Palyne

You know, things in the lowcarb and weightloss categories have been coming up with me, that I haven’t known how to blog about. In part because they are not those happy-joy encouraging, positive things. And in part because I don’t really have an answer to anything, I’m just speculating. Let me go ahead and speculate on-blog-paper. Maybe other people have thought about similar issues. Feel welcome to comment because I’d really like other peoples’ input on this difficult subject.

I have observed the last few months that I can eat really well, and I’m not losing weight. Or when I do, it’s a very small amount over a rather long period of time. I can eat badly, and gain water weight, or actually lose weight on the scale, which is unintuitive, seems quite unfair, is even maddening. Long-term, yes, eating too many carbs drives my weight up, through the water/glycol storage if nothing else. But short term, it often drops the weight several pounds. Maybe because less protein means degraded LBM? God only knows. I can only tell you that the scale does not seem to adequately reflect my eating behavior in the short term. This is the case for other people I know who are about the same size as me, coming from a similar high weight as me.

And for the long term, eating badly will see the numbers rise, but eating well is not seeing them fall. Low calorie. High calorie. Moderate calorie. Low carb. High carb. Moderate carb. Vegetables. No vegetables. High fat. Low fat. With Gluten. Without it. With dairy. Without it. I admit I have not obsessively pursued every one of these, but there should be some vicarious experience here: I have friends online who have pursued many things I haven’t, are about the same size with the same history, and facing the same issues.

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Today I was looking at a sample diabetes association daily menu.

I was aghast. I know enough about my body to know that if I were trying to eat that, I would be starving, cold, miserable, obsessed with food, and probably either binging every few days or eventually just giving up altogether.

Lowcarb could save their life. It isn’t recommended because apparently the authorities think lowcarb is just so totally impossible nobody could eat like that.

I think the most complicating factor is that there are 1.7 billion items in the grocery store that will kill you, and 200 that won’t, 3/4 of which people have never eaten in their life. The situation’s worse in restaurants. But that has nothing to do with the eating plan. That’s environment. The environment in the home, people can manage.

*

When I first started lowcarb, I joked that it was “like trying to be Amish in New York City.” It was HARD. I was constantly faced with the seeming impossibility of getting food together and dealing with eating out somewhere and cooking all-the-freakin-time and so on. I did it, I lost weight, but it was a major pain in the ass.

Now lately, I’ve been doing fine on LC, imperfect but acceptable, losing weight, as has my kid. And I’m realizing: why was this hard?

What was so complicated about it previously, that it seemed hard?

*

I think some was a mental issue. That is, having grown up where endless varieties of crap were all expected to be put in your body for the fun of it, I had a fundamental misunderstanding of one key thing, which is this:

Food = Meat.
Veggies and fruits are nice treats, except if your meat variety is limited (you don’t eat organs, 9 kinds of meat, etc.) they are necessary to add in.

Once I got my head around that, and “animal-based protein” became my priority and vastly dominant food source, a whole lot of everything straightened out on its own.

This doesn’t mean that I can’t make coconut popovers or flax cocoa muffins or almond cookies or lowcarb pizza or whatever. It just means that everything which is not the primary bodily need is something ‘extra’. It isn’t really in the category of ‘food’ except maybe by some percentage of it.

*

I think some was a physical issue.

It is stunning how radically my desire to eat–and WHAT I desire to eat–changes depending on my food intake.

If I eat sufficient protein, veg/fruit and supplements, I pretty much lose most of my cravings for anything else. I don’t even think about food except when it’s time to eat. And I eat until I’m full and that’s fine. And it’s a miracle if I can even get as MANY carbs and calories as I’m trying for in my day. I can stand right next to chocolate, cheesecake, pasta, and literally not care. I don’t have any desire to eat them.

When I find myself “kinda wanting” things that aren’t my basic foods, I know that I haven’t had enough protein or fresh foods or supplements or something.

*

I think some was a habit issue.

I buy decent quantities of chicken and ground beef or roast and I cook it all at once in the crockpot or oven usually. On occasion I’ll chunk up chicken and bake it with a sauce, or throw the chunks in my wok, or coat ‘em with parmesan-herbs and bake, but usually I just cook it all at once. Then I drop it in the freezer or fridge. I can nuke it when I want food, I can mix it in with other foods, whatever. Now that I’ve started having some decent amounts of things in my freezer, often in serving-size plastic bowls, the stress about ‘not having food’ has dimmed a great deal.

It used to seem like a nightmare, the planning and shopping and cooking and cleaning. Now I buy mostly the same things, which takes out most of planning and simplifies shopping, I cook more seldom for ‘full meals’, which simplifies cleaning, too.

*

I think some was a cultural issue.

I grew up with the idea that a meal had several different components to it. You were supposed to have a little meat, a couple of side dishes, a drink, dessert. Except for much of my adult life, the meat took a hike or was barely-there in the midst of pasta or something.

I grew up with the idea that you ate three times a day. As I got older, I ate one time a day. Now I’ve completely ditched that mentality. Now:

* I have usually dairy+berries for meal 1, like a smoothie.
{1/2cup plain yogurt, 1/3cup cream, 1 egg, 6 ice cubes, 1/3 cup frozen wild blueberries or half a dozen frozen whole strawberries, vanilla, cinnamon, sweetzfree, blendered}

* I have eggs, usually with sausage, and hopefully a tiny bit of veggie, for meal 2.
{3 eggs and 2oz sausage, or 4 eggs 1oz sausage, or 3 eggs, 1oz meat, 1oz cheese, and part of a bell pepper}

* I may not have a meal 3 but if I do, it might be a bowl muffin, or a meat-centered leftover, nuked. It is usually very small (>2oz protein). It may include beans (some of the higher-fiber (lower ECC) beans) or peas, but not a lot.

* For meal 4 I have meat. Lots of it. Like 9-12oz depending on the meat and other meals of that day. It sometimes has a bit of veggie as part of it, in a stew or alongside (like bell peppers and broccoli in stir fry). Or not. Often it’s just plain meat. I often make a quick little sauce of some kind for the kid for dipping.

* I may not have a meal 5 but if I do, it might be a tiny gala apple and a few slices of cheese. I only have this if I began eating early and there’s at least 2+ hours before sleeping time.

* I take supplements (finally!), and I recently added a 5,000iu of Vitamin D3 from the Drs. Eades’s site (proteinpower.com) which I kid you not, within about 6 hours or so greatly improved my “sense of well-being.” I think it’s made a big difference. I use a potassium salt substitute to make sure I’m not getting too much sodium (I use sauces from jars/cans sometimes) and that I’m getting enough potassium. I drink diet soda, and then guilt (and zits) cure me and I drink only water for awhile, until I forget why I was doing that and go back to diet soda. ;-)

In the end I have about 20-26oz of animal-based protein a day (varies slightly), not enough veggies but some, a little fruit, a little too much dairy but not too extreme, sometimes a bit of legumes (beans or peas) and some supplements.

I’m losing weight on and the important thing is: I feel really good.

I’m deliberately eating more carbohydrates than I used to, but none of it’s junk, and none is a ton at once. My highest carb intake is my morning smoothie, except the occasion when I have a meat stew that contains some beans.

I don’t feel the way I do in a hard ketosis. I’d be losing weight faster if I were there, but my diet would be a lot more limited.

I don’t feel the way I do when I’m eating tons of carbs (like hell).

I actually feel as if for the first time in my life since I can remember, I must be eating in a way that my body is pretty happy with.

*

And it isn’t rocket science.

So what I can’t figure out is, up until now, why has it been so complicated?

I admit it: I deal poorly with failure. You’d think I’d have adapted by now. That by this age of 42, I’d have evolved some kind of gentle but firm, persistent discipline that my friends have so often had. I so admire that. I sometimes think the people I’ve chosen as friends have often been people with the qualities I most lacked.

This is an odd thing to admit–and will just make me sound like an egotist–but I was blessed, or maybe it’s cursed, with a seeming gift for naturally acquiring skills. Just about anything I’ve ever wanted to do in my life, I decided to do, and it turned out I was pretty talented in that area. From sports to music to intellectual topics to creativity of many kinds, it didn’t matter. It’s always just been a given.

When I was 12 at the skating rink they made me race the 18 year olds and start halfway back the rink and I still beat them. When I was in 5th grade my teacher used my SAT scores to talk with the class about ‘potential’ because I’d scored at college level in every area (I think Math was slightly lower). (Irony: I nearly failed 5th grade. My mom died late the year before and I wasn’t real happy then.) In high school I read the textbooks the first couple days, aced most the tests the rest of the year that were based on it, to the fury of my friends who studied and did more poorly, and I read science fiction the rest of the time. (Not surprisingly, I nearly failed most of high school, too.)

When I decided to teach myself guitar as a teen, my friends, who’d had years of lessons and were working on the same music I was, practiced daily in earnest. I played around for 15 minutes, ignored it for a week, and was better than them by the next weekend, as if my subconscious were working on it. They’d get furious at me, at how unfair it was. They were right: it was. When I decided to enter the local (today they’d call it “Indie”) scene with my original music, people were so ridiculously nice to me I kept looking at them suspiciously. Musicians better than I’ll ever be would just unfold from the woodwork to talk with me and play with me and invite me to stuff. From trivial skills like soul-train dancing as a kid to more useful stuff like subtle language skills for hypnosis/NLP, to a long list of business skills and insert-anything-here, I’ve had it remarkably easy in life.

My life has been significantly difficult in other areas. Maybe the universe is compensating.

And so… I didn’t learn to practice. I didn’t learn much discipline. I didn’t learn anything about persistence. And because anything I bothered trying to do, I did well with remarkably little effort–and I didn’t do things that I wasn’t good at I suspect, and didn’t need to since I had plenty of other choices–I never learned to deal with failure.

*

When I gained a couple hundred pounds quickly, and dieting by the high-carb standard didn’t do anything for me (except make me so miserable I didn’t think I could survive it), I was at a loss. I was 24 and for the first time in my life I had utterly and completely failed. Not only had I become terminally uncool — so much that the career in music I planned since I was 5, my hundreds of songs in a binder from the time I was a teen, were all for nought — but then as if to nail that case closed, my diet efforts failed abysmally to change it.

I didn’t know what to do to fix it. I did everything by the book, hard and perfectionist, and failed. Given no female in my mom’s family had successfully avoided being huge, I figured that was it, I was doomed. Baffled by my failure, and having no idea how to handle it, I went another way: after deciding (barely) not to shoot myself, I just immersed myself in my work and personal interests–generally those which did not require being physically seen by another human being.

*

There is a thing sometimes called state-specific consciousness that refers to memory being associated with certain states of mind. For example, if in one state of mind you had experience A and learned skill B, then for some people, in a different state of mind, they might have a fairly minimal grasp of that memory and skill–but if they shift their state of mind back to where they were ‘present’ when those experiences happened and skills developed, the memories and skills are fully accessible to them. It’s a bit of a phenomenon.

I’m a high hypnotic and I’ve got a good deal of this. Half of what I’ve done through my adult professional life I probably couldn’t do today, without regressing to a mental state much like I had when I did that work (by imagining myself in that situation/etc.), and I assume that as usual, I’d pick up the memories and skills again. In some areas of my personal life — including my obesity — this has an odd way of surprising me.

(Aside from that: there is a TV show called The Pretender that I always felt was a more-advanced version of some innate skill humans have access to, and that’s like a secondary part of the phenomenon: the ability to put oneself in a state of mind that is so highly ‘receptive’ to every kind of subtle information, memory and more, that one can do more than the objective time/info-invested would imply they should be able to. Some would call this psychic; others would just consider it having access to a vast database of mnemonic, subconscious information.)

*

I recently attempted some half-squats, and had dismal luck with them. I’m sure with something firmer to hold onto I will do ok. I can do a full squat but my knees feel terror. (Literally, and speaking of ‘phenomena’: the sense I have is that the fear is felt by my knees, not my head for my knees. Odd!)

I was SO ANGRY that I couldn’t just DO it, that I ended up just stomping out, this was days aog, and haven’t gone back to my weights room since.

Because: I really have a problem with failure.

I just need to accept that I am not a 19 year old tennis playing windsurfing judo throwing California girl fashion zombie performer anymore… I am a 42 year old mega-morbidly obese midwestern mom now. It just keeps pissing me off!

So the reasonable question is: If you’re 42 years old, and you’ve been insanely fat for nigh on 20 years, why aren’t you used to it already? Why is a full mirror or store window a ghastly, horrifying shock? Why is who and what you are now surprising in any way? What part of the last 20 years didn’t prepare you for your condition of today?

*

The reality is that I have deliberately paid so little attention to myself for the last 20 years that it seems like there was the me that was ‘aware’ all that time ago, and then the me that is just waking up to being more aware of myself today… as if the 20 years in the middle, in terms of my perception of self, have been bizarrely condensed into a few weeks of moments of attention separated by long duration periods of denial.

So now that I am finally “paying attention to myself” more, it feels like, “Whoa, what the — what?! You have GOT to be kidding me!”

I can’t believe I can’t do a squat. I can’t believe that my eight pound dumbbell weights are plenty. I can’t believe I wear a 5x (if slightly stretchy) pants size. I can’t believe that horrible image in the pictures is me. I can’t believe that reflection in the store window is me. I am stunned, even dumbfounded at times, as if I woke up one day in the body of someone different, and the dreams got me used to life and the history, but the conscious self is completely unadapted to my new reality.

Because I quit paying attention. When I realized (or believed) that I could not change my weight, that I could not salvage the future I planned until then, that I could not bear the horrible fact of my rather swift and profound obesity, the ghastly spectre of it overwhelmed me, and I just . . . tuned out.

And so, the realization, and the frustration, and the coming-to-terms, that I should have done at the age of 24, I am now doing at the age of 42.

And despite that I consciously understand my condition–I don’t even try to run, for example–still, the dominant part of me thinks that I should be as tough and athletic as I was last time I knew me–last time I was paying attention.

That part of me thinks that it ought to be easy, like everything used to be. That I ought to be able to go in there and lift weights, or whatever else I might want to do, and do very well with it. That I should pick an intelligent eating plan like the one Regina outlined and within days, weeks, months, be the poster child for nutritional good sense as a result.

*

I am regularly amazed that eating low carb, AND eating healthily, AND getting exercise, are only easy until they are hard. Too often so far, on the day something gets hard, I quit doing it. Because somehow I have managed to so effortlessly be good at things throughout my life, that I haven’t developed the persistent discipline you’d expect from a well-raised farm boy of 10.

So I am also learning, as if I am a small child, about staying with something that is hard. Aside from the business environment (where all those adaptive traits abound in me for some reason, probably for the same reason other skills come easy), I haven’t got that trait in my personal life yet.

I’m learning about having to work at something, like my friends did. About having to be persistent, and having to deal with failure — repeatedly — and pick myself up, dust off my butt and get back to what I know I want to be doing.

*

The good news is, low-carb has given me a doorway to success. There was no hope, I thought, all those years ago. There was no point to trying, or to paying attention to myself, if it was hopeless. I used to say, “Only optimists kill themselves. Pessimists aren’t surprised their life sucks.” I was pessimistic enough about the outlook of my obesity to turn my attention elsewhere, to something I thought I could make a difference with, which was “anything but my body”.

Maybe for men looking to lose 20 pounds, lowcarb is a quick fix. But for someone starting huge, even the best eating plan in the world is going to be a very long term effort to lose that extra weight–and it’s entirely possible that it will never fully come off. As a result, the “persistence for the long term” becomes more critical in someone like me. Anybody can do some-big-deal for a limited duration. But for the morbidly obese (and diabetic), the lowcarb eating plan is a rest-of-your-life thing.

Lowcarb isn’t really a wagon to fall off. There is only one true failure point in low carb eating: when you die. Until then, you have another day, another meal, another hour, another chance to do it right, to drag up the energy to eat well enough to feel well enough to move well enough to lose well enough to change your life. You gotta start somewhere. For some of us it’s a lot higher than others.

But no matter the reason someone eats lowcarb, one truism exists: on lowcarb ketogenic, the eating part is the easy part. It’s the wrapping your head around yourself and where you really are and all the changes you go through, that merely attempting to lose weight (let alone succeeding!) bring on.

It doesn’t come fast. It doesn’t come without a monumental learning curve about nutrition and metabolism and your own unique body–and mind. It’s a long hard road, and it takes persistence — and the ability to deal with occasional failure in one respect or another — to succeed.

It doesn’t come easy. But it comes.

Eons ago I wrote a simplistic little folk song (as a teen) that ended with the line, “I was looking for a rainbow… and I found gold.”

I’ve been reading the lowcarber forum recently and it struck me:

I have learned so, so much from lowcarbing.

Ironically, only some of the things I’ve learned have much to do with the carb count of foods.

And a good dose of the things I’ve learned are about me, and my psychology, and my relationships, and a whole host of things–some of which I learned because getting healthier made me see things differently, and some of which I learned because maybe, just maybe, there is a complex web of social, psychological, mental, emotional, and physical things going on that result in a person being overweight let alone morbidly obese, so if you’re working toward weight loss or health improvement, you’re bound to stumble on some of them.

Even how I evaluate other people has changed in some respects. I actually grant some slack now when I know someone is living on a doctor-approved low-fat diet; I know they are miserable and probably feel like death warmed over. I have a lot less tolerance for people spouting their politicized pseudo-nutrition jargon at me, now that I’ve learned at least a little something about food and metabolism. I have a lot more faith in myself to “deal with” — even if it never reduces to anywhere near what I’d like in my dreams — my body. I have a lot less humiliation socially in some respects, because I’m smaller than I was, so there is a small sense of pride in that.

A couple years ago I hadn’t been able to wear anything but skirts, usually a few of them at a time layered, and thong-sandals, as I couldn’t find shoes to fit — even in the dead of winter wetness and ice I wore this. Now I wear slightly stretchy cargo pants and a tank top if I want. I just recently got to the point where I was actually brave enough to wear, get this: “pants and a shirt.” That is, WITHOUT a tent-sized knee-length long shirt over everything, no matter what the temperature, to be utterly certain I was sparing every person in visual range from the hideousness of my fat.

Back then I couldn’t stand for 60 seconds without a searing, burning, screaming back pain, and walking to the car nearly overwhelmed me, and now I can mow, and weed-eat, and rake, and shovel some garden soil. Granted, I have to rest between, but I’m wearing normal clothes and acting like a normal person… well, as normal as a weirdo like me is ever going to get, and that has nothing to do with fat haha!– the change in my life from 5/06 to 5/08 is STAGGERING.

I can’t tell you how much more I feel like doing something physical and constructive, when I can just put on normal clothes and tennis shoes and go out and do it. When I can walk without major impediment, stand without pain, do minor exercise (very minor) without instant exhaustion.

Lowcarb did that for me. But the process of doing lowcarb over time is a big part of far more than my body.

I never cooked. I’m still learning. I still have not whipped egg whites stiff or successfully and edibly cooked a whole chicken and used the bones for a follow-up soup, but that is coming. I can make a whole lot of other stuff. I can even experiment now and then and it usually comes out pretty decent. I actually feel halfway competent in the kitchen which is making me a little more courageous. Not as courageous as the fabulous Niki at O.2.B.Fit whose zillions of recipes leave me drooling, but still, in my own way, braver than I’ve ever been.

Being influenced by people like Regina at Weight of the Evidence has made me pay more attention to nutrition. I’m still alternately doing well or not-at-all on lowcarb with a nutrition angle, but I pay a lot more attention to veggies and vitamins than I ever did, and it’s gradually getting better. I sometimes wonder, if my life is so different and better two years after beginning lowcarb, what might it be like in five years?

I’m so happy to have found lowcarb.

Even when I am not ON lowcarb, I’m happy to have found it. Funny huh! Even if I am eating a Butterfinger because I’m not doing LC at the moment and feel like it, I am still not having rice for dinner or donuts for breakfast because of my concern for their carbs. I hadn’t thought about it until this morning when I realized that even when I am eating really badly, not LC at all, I still eat vastly better — much less junk and for much less duration — than I ate before I learned about LC.

Merely SEEING the Gary Taubes book on my shelf can re-invoke days of almost nothing but meat, eggs and veggies frankly, heh!

When I wake up bloated, aching, can barely move, my brain is fogged, now I think, “Need to do lowcarb at least a few days, you’ve been eating crap, that’s why you feel like crap.” It is astounding to me that I used to feel that way every single day of my life and that was NORMAL.

I’ve learned a little about people. I’ve made more women-friends through lowcarb than every other source and all the previous 40 years of my life combined, go figure–I’ve found more women “like me” in lowcarb than anywhere, and I don’t know why that is, but I’m pretty happy for it.

I hope you guys are learning more than the carb counts of foods too. I bet you are. It’s fascinating to me, in a sociology and psychology sense, how nearly every serious pursuit no matter what it is, explores a deeper and wider aspect of as individuals than it ever seemed like it would from the outside.

As you may recall (if your internet memory is long), March Madness for me was asking for “eating plan ideas” and choosing one to go forth with. There were a ton of great outlines suggested–I could have taken any one of them and been better for it–but in the end I chose one put together by Regina over at The Weight of the Evidence.

Now, this won’t come as any surprise to most of you, because I know you’re smarter than me, but since I’m eternally pollyannic about how easy everything in life should be I was shocked by the lesson:

Eating well is not the same thing as eating low-carb.

I think I confuse these, and after further reflection, I think maybe a lot of people do, at least on occasion.

Sure, I can see the extremes and recognize it. We’ve got the Kimkins variants on the Cinnamon Toothpick Diet and we can easily see that no matter how lowcarb it might be, it’s also ridiculous, unless you really want to lose all the weight your hair is taking up, which saves all that time blow-drying it in the morning anyway–surely a selling point for a variety of Eating Plans That Can Kill You.

But it’s less obvious that more ‘reasonable’ low-carb eating plans, particularly those that non-geniuses like me gradually adapt, are not necessarily healthy just because they’re low-carb. You can skip gluten and skip dairy and skip this and skip that and keep your carbs under 40 and still eat badly. I hadn’t thought about this much until now. I’d thought about it in the context of staying on an eating plan, and in the inspiration after finishing the Gary Taubes book, but hadn’t given a lot of thought to how genuinely *healthy* a given eating plan is.

It seems to me that some people–that would be ME–pay more attention to what they CAN’T have, than to what they SHOULD have.

***

Many of the skills I’ve been building for eating lowcarb over the last 18 months, go totally to waste on Regina’s plan.

Do I need low-cal? I can do that. How about low-carb? I can do that. All meat? No problem. Sixteen eggs a day? I’m on it. Yes! I can juggle protein pudding and flax seed souffle and exactly 2,197 calories per day as adjusted by a 5.2% carbohydrate limit replete with exactly 7.5 sliced black olives every day except Wednesday and track this to the gram along with my weight, my mood, my food, the weather, and the digestive habits of all 8 of my cats, in a spreadsheet with seven auxilliary workbook pages including charts, graphs, and graduated projections.

In other words, when it comes to any extreme, I do just fine.

Regina’s plan has been an educational experience–which is not to say I get any passing grade this month–and, as an ex fiance of mine used to say, “Things which are good for you are rarely pleasant”–(he meant me?)–but I have to say it’s been pretty enlightening for reasons almost unrelated to food.

What she recommended, you see, was not merely some guideline–the more extreme and bizarre the better–for food. No, just to complicate things, just to make it a head-banging challenge for me, what she primarily recommended was SANITY.

So, not surprisingly, I’ve had some real problems with it.

***

First, she recommended that I not be my rather obsessive self: that I just eat well according to the general outline and not measure everything in mass detail, not record everything in mass detail, not stand on the scale six times a day — just, you know, eat WELL and RELAX about it.

Eat well and relax about it? Who the heck can do THAT?

Now, I have approximately two settings in life: 120%, and ‘Off’. So already I was in trouble. Her plan wasn’t weird, extreme, bizarre, or hugely complicated. Those would have been easy. It was reasonable, balanced and moderate, which made it hard.

Secondly, her plan was a small to moderate amount of many things. So unlike my previous “dietary adaptations”, my tried and true approach to making lowcarb work wasn’t appropriate.

For example, my proven ability to simply eat a 4-5oz dose of super lowcarb chili verde for 36 meals in a row, which beautifully solved not only my carb number but my protein number too, that easy extreme wasn’t called for here.

At the drop of a hat I can demonstrate my ability to eat more eggs per day than a 370 lb. tree snake, but that wasn’t actually required either, since the idea was balance.

I’ve a full stock of “low carb processed foods” like protein powder, LC slimfast and puddings, but since she was recommending “real food” these weren’t needed.

In a pinch, I can even live on “low carb junk foods” like pepperoni and mozzarella nuked, but as she was recommending plain healthy food and not processed meats, plus veggies, that was out too.

This left me in the terribly uncomfortable position of actually needing to eat real food. And not just occasionally.

Despite having the divine inspiration of my friend Sarah, who somehow can make a garlic roasted chicken and asparagus sound great even for the 1,928,625th time, so far I have not got a very good handle on eating WELL.

I am very good at eating low-carb when I choose to. But eating low-carb and eating well are not necessarily the same thing. This is the big lesson for the month.

***

And then there’s the green stuff:

Regina’s eating plan built in the assumption that because I was eating real, healthy food, in no extremes, that having fibrous vegetables daily would be reasonable.

This ruled out “nuking frozen peas with a bunch of butter” as my sole veggie. And it’s not summer/fall so I can’t pawn all my veggie needs off on peppers. And alliums and fungus (garlic, onions and mushrooms) are not veggies. So…

I ate broccoli once. Doused in too much soy sauce and stir fried. I was really proud of myself. After which I felt like I had maxx’d out my veggie interest for at least a month.

When I realized I had to find a BUNCH more veggies, EVERY SINGLE DAY, the shower theme from ‘Psycho’ played in my head. I panicked. I don’t LIKE enough veggies to eat them regularly! And no burying them in 30 carbs worth of stir-fry sauce either. Good grief! What to do?!

My solution: I quit eating except at dinner. That resolved needing to worry about my vegetables 2/3 of the time, because it resolved needing to worry about anything 2/3 of the time. Of course, this obliterated all chance of meeting the daily goals of her eating plan (for obvious reasons). So it was not the appropriate response.

But it taught me, or reminded me, that this IS my common response to any sense of stress-challenge about food: I simply quit eating, often until I’m hungry enough that eventually I’ll eat anything, including bad things, but not give a rat’s butt about it by that time because I’m really hungry. When I ‘care’, when hunger is reasonable, if I don’t “feel like” eating well for some reason (whether good ones, like I don’t have the food, to bad ones, like I’m too lazy to cook), I put off eating, eventually driving myself to the other extreme. A dysfunctional, crisis-creating tendency. I’m sure this is echoed in many other areas of my life I choose to be in denial about right now.

As if this wasn’t enough, she also recommended that I take a few supplements. This would require actually getting off my butt to BOTHER. I glanced at my spreadsheets where–in previous “less relaxed” eating periods–I have tracked every detail of my low-carb obsession. I noted something:

I “intended” to take supplements basically every day since about September 2006 when I began this lowcarb effort. Out of about 550 days since, I have met this goal approximately 8 times…IF I round up.

So… while patting myself on the back because I wasn’t exceeding 30 carbs, I managed to completely overlook, in convenient denial, that I was not only failing to eat any decent veggies for the past 1.5 years, but abysmally failing to take supplements, either.

In short, I am malnutritioned, despite the fact that I’ve been obsessing on my food for most of (give or take some months off here and there) the last 1.5 years.

And this is mostly because of that easy confusion about the difference between eating LOW-CARB vs. eating WELL.

***

Next, I discovered that my personality is . . . in need of some improvement in a few places–this will not surprise many people around me who’ve griped about this for eons of course, but I’m referring to issues related to my eating plan now.

I do things in total overdrive — for limited periods. I’m a sprinter, not a long distance runner. I start super-hard, and I go way overboard on stuff, from the emotional investment to the physical discipline, and then it had better be over fairly soon because I burn out totally and lose all interest in it and walk away.

Normally in my life, here is how I handle this appropriately: I don’t. Instead, I adapt the things around me: I make a point to have too many things to do. That way, I can always be doing something to the extreme, then when I burn out on it, I do something else to the extreme, and so on down the line. Eventually I feel like doing one of the earlier things again.

When you take all the “extreme” and all the “didn’t do it at all” and put them together, you end up with what SEEMS like, from the outside, a consistent, normal progress. But it really isn’t. It’s more like bouncing off the extremes, and “the average in the middle looks good on paper.”

This works fine for programming; I’m a code hack at 3am for a week sometimes and don’t even look at it for the next 3 weeks. It works fine for a surprising number of things. It does not, however, work very well for “a sane eating plan.”

Also, it creates an interesting–if annoying–side-effect: it means that either I am obsessing on something or I am not doing it at all.

So, per instructions, I did not obsess on March’s eating plan.

Which is to say, that a good deal of the time, I didn’t do it at all.

Apparently this is now my eating plan for April too. And for every month until I GET IT RIGHT for at least a month, because now it’s a matter of honor. Not to mention a matter of health!

***

I know that every reasonable person reading this is thinking, “Why is it so hard to be reasonable? Why not just be sane, moderate, balanced, appropriate, and have meat and veggies at nearly every meal?”

I don’t know why it’s so hard. Maybe my extreme personality is one reason I got so fat in the first place–my ability to eat nothing at all followed by overeating carbs bigtime, during extreme phases of overwork, overstress, and sleep deprivation–that’s the formula that did a fantastic job making me gigantic in a surprisingly short time.

But this is a life-wide personality issue, not just a food issue. This affects everything in my world, from gardening to motherhood, from friends to online projects. Somewhere in the back of my head, my father’s voice is lecturing me about priorities.

***

So all together, adding up my last month of experience, here is my result:

1. I failed 90% of the time at eating veggies. On the other hand, 10% of the veggies was more than I usually have, so I have to give myself some slack for that. Maybe next month I can increase the %, even if not perfect yet.

2. I failed 99% at taking supplements. This is some kind of passive aggressive, mind bogglingly lazy or in-denial thing, so I’ve got no excuse for it except that I sucked and I obviously need work in this area.

3. I did well at eating mostly protein, but much of the time I didn’t eat enough, because I was so busy avoiding the fact that I couldn’t eat perfectly at every meal that I skipped 2/3 of my meals. Obviously one can’t eat well if they’re not eating.

4. I ate more dairy (in cheese form) than I was supposed to, mostly on the days when I was living on tacos (let’s just not go there ok), but I ate LESS dairy than I normally do, so that is an improvement I think.

5. I ate ‘a few’ organic things, not many. There are not many available to me easily and most are way expensive, and I often have a hard enough time with ordinary food costs for lowcarb let alone organic stuff. But a few is better than none and maybe I can continue the search for more of the stuff.

6. I ate off plan a few times–sweet things. I don’t normally crave sweets. I think going without food for too many meals, combined with PMS, and probably typical low O2 from sleeping (I don’t wear the apnea mask I should), resulted in a desperate need for energy. When I want ‘junk’ I usually crave bread-carbs, not sugar-carbs; sugar almost always means my body feels critically under-energy’d. I attribute this in part to not eating sufficient protein, not eating, and not taking supplements, any one of which would probably have prevented the problem. So, I’ll work on doing better.

***

I think her eating plan is eminently reasonable, extremely healthy, and well balanced. How a very unreasonable, slightly dysfunctional, definitely not very balanced individual (unless you count being equally far on the extreme edges as ‘balanced’), APPLIES themselves to this kind of eating plan, is another story.

It becomes a food-as-therapy thing. “Chop broccoli, drink water,” to paraphrase the eastern sages.

A person living an unhealthy lifestyle is not going to become magically healthy when assigned a good eating plan, not because the plan wouldn’t help, but because without some internal changes, they’re unlikely to be able to follow such a plan. They’ll eventually want to go back to just eating meat, then just eating eggs, then eating 36 straight meals of chili verde, then living off fabulously complicated baked concoctions, then — well you get the idea. The extreme stuff is somehow easier to follow–although, obviously, only in the shorter terms.

The long term, day by day, reasonable, plodding along — that is where the real work of healthy living comes in.

And I assume when you do that, it becomes habit. Regina probably makes broccoli casserole in her sleep, just like Sarah can whip up entire meals in microseconds that would take me a week of planning and days to implement. Some people, whether by nature or by persistent practice, seem to have “eating well” down pat.

***

One specific thing I think I need — call it an “exercise” toward the larger goal — is to work on making vegetables edible. I don’t really know how.

I tried a cauli cheese casserole. It was horrible. I don’t like cauli, and it tastes like cauli. Now this might sound more than stupid, but the shredded cauli stir-fried like chicken fried rice, doesn’t taste anything like cauli, so I was hopeful. So much for that. And so far I only seem to like broccoli with too much soy sauce, so that needs a better way of cooking, I just don’t know it’ll be edible when done. I haven’t dared try asparagus for years but want to. (I’ve composted plenty in my fridge veggie drawer though, in my optimism.)

I think if I could successfully cook a few veggies in a way that I liked them–this is not easy, I’ve never eaten them my whole life because I don’t like them!–that obviously, getting them regularly into my diet will then be easier.

So through the month of April, I hope to come up with several ways to eat decent veggies that are not laborious and that actually taste ok to me and the kid.

April is another attempt at “healthy eating.” I believe I can do better than I did LAST month — and that will be something. If I could do even that for a few months, I would have a vastly healthier habit by the time I got there.

April is for sanity. The rains just arrived here on the flat edge of the ozarks, the sort that turn streets into veritable rivers and cause the grass to suddenly go from two inches of spotty winter nothing to nine inches of overgrowth waiting to dry so you can mow it. I have gardening and landscaping and other things to focus on as well. I have hope that in a month, I can report a definite *improvement* in my “average quantity of sane, well-balanced eating.”

Now…

If sane and reasonable eating actually helps me be saner and more reasonable, that would be a novel side-effect. That might be putting a little too much into it though. Then Regina would not only be my nutritionist, she’d be my shrink.

Hmmmn. It could happen! ;-)

Some days when I am crankier than usual, there is something that really bugs me about, in general, “the low carb world” that I see online. (Meaning, the overall ’social result’ of community.) Do you ever notice this?

It’s this: so many people just want to eat crap.

If you tell them they can’t have crappy carbs, they instantly start doing everything they can to reproduce the crap in a lowcarb fashion.

Surely this must be what inspired all those horrible frankenfood pseudo-lowcarb abominations that bombed in the grocery world (and gave the erroneous impression to marketers that “low-carb is dead” as a result).

I found that when I quit eating things breaded, for example, I quit needing to find semi-lowcarb grain-based specialty-foods for breading stuff. This matters because, even though you can do it, most the time it means you use the majority of your daily carb on lowcarb bread crumbs or carbquik instead of on something actually good for you like veggies. (Or at least almonds or seeds or cheese or something.)

If it were just a little in a muffin batch or meatloaf it’d be one thing, but foods with major elements that are based on crappy food have more than one problem.

I’ve nothing against creative food. It’s one of my personal focii in fact. And I’ve nothing against reproducing highcarb food in lowcarb ways really, that’s natural. Except that some things, you really cannot produce in a lowcarb way without either getting into highly processed stuff or …

Or without keeping your taste for it. If despite being lowcarb, I continued to eat tacos instead of taco salad, burgers instead of pattymelts, and breaded chicken instead of baked, roasted, crocked, parm’d, grilled chicken, then I would still WANT those things.

A great deal of going-off-lowcarb seems to hinge on the person feeling like there is something that is high-carb that they just aren’t getting. Over time, I’ve come to feel that in fact, the problem is not that there is something they aren’t getting. The problem is that they have not adapted to “wanting what they have.”

Think of it like an appetite for sex — food being related. ;-) A man might not have the buxom blonde coworker he thinks is sexy, but that is only an issue if he really wants her. If he is happy with his woman, he won’t CARE that he doesn’t/can’t have the other one; it may be eye-candy just like some high-carb foods are, sure, but it’s just no big deal and there is no real desire that would make him give up what he has.

Well I think it’s kinda similar with food. If a person keeps eating “crap-LIKE” foods, they continue their appetite for crap food. Then when someone goes, “Hey, here’s some crap food!” they eventually think, “Wow, that looks great, and it’s even more familiar-tasting than the crap-LIKE food I’ve been faking on lowcarb!”

But if you adapt people to eating real food in a way that is healthy, and they learn to like real food made healthily, then they have far less reason to “go off” lowcarb. They don’t feel like they’re “missing or faking” a burger bun with lettuce. They don’t feel like they’re missing a tortilla when they eat the ingredients as a hot plate. They don’t feel like they’re missing breading when they eating roasted chicken.

And eventually, they will breed an appetite, and a FAMILIARITY, with good food, and reduce both appetite and familiarity with the crap. Familiarity is one of the big issues too.

So, some days it just irks me to see so many trying to stuff highcarb into lowcarb. Crap is crap. I don’t care if Wheat Protein Isolate and Sweetzfree and ThickNThin made it possible to just barely squeeze that food through the digestive system as “a mostly low-carb ECC” value. That only means that
(a) all those carbs someone could have eaten in life-giving food, they didn’t, and
(b) they continue their familiarity with that food, and
(c) they continue their appetite for food that tastes like that, and
(d) they continue their dependence on specialty foods the local grocery likely doesn’t have or that cost more.

I’m not saying we can’t use high-carb or specialty-stuff. I do. I’m just saying that sometimes I see people who so overwhelm their food with it, either so often, or so overwhelmingly in a given dish, that the reality is, they are NOT “adapting to eating lowcarb as a lifestyle,” they are instead, “attempting to temporarily adapt lowcarb eating to be just like the crappy highcarb eating they always did, except the carbs, and a sense of ‘fake/not as good’.”

Until people learn to LIKE lowcarb well enough that they have NO REASON to be “so tempted by that buxom blonde breaded-fried chicken that they “fall off the wagon” and have some, lowcarb is going to BE a wagon that they can fall off.

Because that is really the point: men don’t sleep with the secretary because they want her, they sleep with her because they have lost interest or concern for their wife. So the reality is that the reason for the wandering-into-badlands is about his relationship with his wife and how he feels about that. If you see what I mean. Well if your relationship with your lowcarb food is great, you have no reason to feel you “need” high-carb food. Because it isn’t about what you don’t have, it’s about how well you like and are comfortable with what you DO have.

When you can eat a piece of roasted chicken, a plain hamburger patty, some stir fried broccoli, and be genuinely happy for it — love it, have it be your most familiar food, have it be something your body learns to have an appetite for — lowcarb is no longer HARD. It’s easy and constant and familiar.

Anything that’s hard, is usually temporary. So it matters.

That is my soapbox for the night!

PJ

In mid-2005 I had a long talk with my Ex. It had been 5 years since I’d made him move out, which means all the way back to Canada, for a long list of unusually good reasons. We hadn’t been more than roommates since Jan 1997 anyway. He wanted to come back (as a roommate-only) and this time ‘for real’ apply for citizenship (finally). No matter that I had no desire to put up with him again, I knew that my kid having her dad locally vs. in another country had to be the priority.

Suddenly inspired, as he likes to cook and garden, I told him that one of the requirements of our agreement, would be that he would cook. Lowcarb, so that I could be healthier without taking all the time myself since I worked, and semi-lowcarb (at the least, “real food”) for the kid, who was beginning to get just a little chubby. Given my weight, of course, I was worried for her, and wanted to stop that in its tracks. She was about 4′9-4′10 then, and about 110 lbs.

Like most things that you know are bad ideas, those wrong things that you are doing for the right reasons, it didn’t work out anything like I planned.

He still “couldn’t get around to” applying for citizenship, turned my entire house into such an ebay warehouse there was no room for a kitchen table or even more than a sideways-path through the living room, all while not providing a dime of his income for rent, food, bills, the kid, etc. After previously having ruined me with an IRS situation I will probably never afford to resolve as long as I live, he promptly settled into the same routine again. But…

Worse, in the end, was the food issue. He had no actual interest in making LC food, so most the time I didn’t eat. When he would make something, it was only if it was easy enough to involve LC bread, but since I’m gluten intolerant, then I’d have asthma/allergies, worse apnea problems, lower oxygen level, etc. (Not that he cared, of course!) When I got inspired to do it myself in frustration, he’d promptly make garlic bread or something he knew was my biggest weakness, or the kitchen (now ‘his’) would be so gross I’d just walk away again with no appetite. So I gradually gained weight, from 414 to 467 over 12 months, which I had to lose (fortunately I lost all that and more from Sep-Dec 06).

When it came to the kid, he had even less concern than I had previously, I guess. She ate dominantly fast food and mac&cheese and spaghetti and so on. After 18 months, the kid had gained well over 50 lbs (weighing 165 at 4′11), serious cellulite, the inability to get into anything sold in walmart that is wearable without fashion suicide, could barely get in the biggest karate gi, and now had a nightmare of taunting and humiliation at school. Since the other problems with him were just as present as ever, that was it, and I gave up and made him leave before he ruined my life twice.

That left the kid’s eating habits back in my court.

***

So then I wanted to put her on lowcarb, but nearly everybody made it clear to me that my eating plan was ‘extreme’ and that this would be totally inappropriate for a child. Sure, I could avoid McDonald’s, but “whole grains!” were “necessary”, and apples and bananas and plums and corn and so on, “How could fruit and veggies be unhealthy?”

The leading critic was my stepmother, who thinks the ADA advice is the law. (Her family, under this advice, has died off eyes by feet by heart attacks by cancer for the last 20 years, but this has not changed her views.) We had actual arguments about pasta.

The consensus seemed to be that my denying my kid mac&cheese was some kind of child abuse, because “all things in moderation” was the answer to life, and “pasta is not harmful, and kids love it!”. The fact that I didn’t want her eating potatoes was treated with an attitude as if I’d said that I was sacrificing her to an alien god. I mean it was crazy how simply avoiding high-carbs, not eating a potato, was seen as such a major thing.

Then age 10, she was a carb addict already, begging constantly for bread-pasta-sugar products, to the degree that she didn’t WANT to eat anything else, and would NOT eat anything else if anything with carbs/sugar was an option. It was hard even for me to stay on lowcarb when my house was filled with carby crap I love too of course, and she was constantly begging for fast food or sweets etc.

So about 8 months later, which is around October of ‘07, she was 5′0 and 160. She’d grown at least an inch in the previous 8 months and yet was around the same on the scale, so at least she wasn’t gaining MORE weight. But she had reached the point where her karate gi just wouldn’t work, and left the one exercise I was overpaying for her to have, and she had almost no clothes for school since finding stuff to fit her was so difficult in our small town.

She would sometimes spend a couple hours at night just pouring out her grief and misery about being fat, and not being able to wear cute clothes, and how people at school treated her, and more. I wasn’t fat in school (though I felt I was), so I didn’t have the peer results of that, but her obvious suffering just made me grieve inside for my baby that obviously I was not “protecting” the way I felt a mom should.

Around November 2006, I finally snapped. That was when she could no longer go to karate for lack of fitting a gi. I felt like somehow that was the last straw, “Her certain doom”.

And I put her on MY lowcarb plan. I decided everybody else could stuff their opinions. She was 11, 5′0, and weighed 164, that was about 6 weeks ago.

I did make a couple exceptions for her: once or twice a week I give her a little corn & peas nuked with some butter as a treat (those are more carby than I can eat, but I let her). I let her have as much fibrous veggies (the ones I make for both of us, broccoli, asparagus, cauli, peppers, onion, and more for her than me, baby carrots) and berries as she wants. I don’t worry about counting her carbs or calories — I simply make a point that nothing she eats is anything but lowcarb.

This meant that I started cooking a LOT more — 2-4x a day — so that she would always have “real food” and not be eating stuff from a can or frozen box or fast food, because mom was busy. This was a really big shift in my own time allotment to be honest, and if I hadn’t been on lowcarb, I wouldn’t have been healthy enough to have the energy/strength to do it. It has meant a substantial shift in my “available time” in a day. But since I started having her help me, it also meant that she and I spent a little more time together.

She used to tell me that she was constantly hungry. That even after she ate she was hungry. That she seemed to have “no off button” and that she would eat until she was sick if she had her way. She certainly did want to nosh 24/7 it seemed. So the rule I had was that I didn’t want her to be hungry on lowcarb, EVER, and I would try to make sure there was always something she could eat.

To my surprise, she started quickly asking for more meat. I mean, the girl ate meat like it was going out of style, and hasn’t stopped. I thought she would beg for more of whatever had the most carbs, but no. She became a protein fiend. I was a little nervous about this for awhile. I wondered if maybe she was overeating and I should put limits on it. But as I had recently read the Gary Taubes book “Good Calories, Bad Calories” and noted all the research with animals (and some humans), I decided if she was craving protein, it was probably that her body actually NEEDED protein.

In the end, I adopted this strategy: I make her wait 30 minutes after our meal. If she still wants more food, I will make her more. That’s just to make sure she isn’t inhaling dinner and it hasn’t yet hit the tummy. She still continues to eat a lot of protein. Not too much for her size, just vastly more than she ever had. She used to only want carbs. The shift has been astounding.

And in just over a month, she went from not fitting in a size 17 jeans, to fitting easily in size 15, and I don’t think it’ll be that long before she’s in a 14.

She has noticed repeatedly and with great delight how much her stomach is smaller, her upper arms are thinner, the extra fat around her neck/chin has disappeared, her thighs, butt and calves are smaller — even her feet are smaller and no longer “puff out on top” in slipper-style flats.

For the first time in a long time, she now has at least enough clothing to not feel mortified at school. She now can put on clothes and look in the mirror and not cry. She actually “feels cool” and proud of how she looks.

Here’s the interesting thing: She weighed 162 the other day — only 2 lbs less than when we began. And yet, she’s lost 2-3 pants sizes, and obvious fat everywhere!

Now my sneaking suspicion is that her body was chronically protein deprived, and used all this meat she’s been eating like crazy to build up her lean body mass again, so all the fat she has lost, balanced against muscle rebuilt, comes out to about equal.

Her energy level is much higher. Her attitude and affection are 200% better. Thank god — the whiny lazy angry girl seems to have greatly changed. Getting her to do chores is vastly easier. Those are side-effects I didn’t expect! They rock!

And here’s the real kicker: she no longer begs for carbs and sugar. She no longer pleads for Taco Bell because she’s so hungry and it’s fast and cooking would take awhile. She is so EXCITED by the idea that eating this way has helped her lose bodyfat, that with rare exceptions, she doesn’t WANT to eat carbs. There have been times when I was willing to slide on something, and she said, “No!”

She has become a huge supporter in my lowcarb journey — instead of a problem. She is the one now that encourages me to go to the walking park with her. And given the amount of meat she eats, and how much she loves veggies, it’s been super helpful in improving even the way I do lowcarb eating, re-focusing me on those elements.

She’s so beautiful. And now, she is so much happier. As well as healthier. And she looks better, honestly, though there is still more extra fat to lose, I trust now that it will come off. She is going back to karate and will be more easily able to do it as well, I am sure. Her legs look longer, and she is just so much happier across the board, that it is clear that her misery at school and with herself because of her weight was affecting her a good deal.

I just wanted to report that. I know that I’ve had a lot of insecurity as a mother about “what is proper to feed the kid”. Isn’t it weird that most of our culture will not blink about living at McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, and people will argue a kid’s “need” to have pasta, yet if you tell them you’re making the kid eat mostly meat, dairy, fibrous veggies and berries, they act like it’s some bizarre diet-cult that you’re inflicting on them?!

***

As for me, I am down to 370 now. No big deal really, since health is now my priority before fat loss — low carb is about health-sanity for me, not a diet — but everything helps as far as my energy level and comfort goes. Since I began at over 500# (and a size 8x on the bottom–tip: they don’t make clothes for that size…), that’s fairly significant.

My 6x pants, one brand is falling off me, the other brand fits ok but loosely. Today I splurged and ordered 6x and 5x ‘cargo pants’ from Junonia — which will be the first ‘real’ pants (not stretchy soft things) that I’ve worn since… since… 1991 or so. (And of course, I could wear nothing but homemade skirts for years and years.) I can wear the 5x shirts my parents have bought me for the last few years at Christmas, so that was nice, that I instantly have several new things to wear.

I can do walking I couldn’t before, I can fit in seats at the city theatre now, where musicals and ballet and stuff happen (finally, I can take my kid to those!), and on the whole I just feel a lot better.

I have shifted every meal to either protein powder + cream + flax seeds (for me only, and sometimes frozen berries in there), or to MEAT primarily, usually with veggies. We eat a whole lot of simple hamburger patties, pork cutlets, or chicken breasts, with and without sauces or cheeses or dressings, and usually with stir-fried veggies.

We were still able to make super yummy holiday treats (peanut butter cookies, almond joys), and now and then when we want something sweet, I’ll make some kind of bowl muffin (egg, cream cheese, flax seed, flavor extracts, sweetzfree, and sometimes cocoa)… or LC cheesecake. Not often, but on occasion when she is feeling like she wants something sweet.

She’s happy, I’m happy, we’re both losing fat and gaining energy, and life is going well. 2008 will be great! I feel sure of it. :-)

Before I say this, I need to point out that PASTA WILL PROBABLY KILL YOU. OK, my moral duty is done.

Next, I also want to point out that Big Daddy D has a zucchini-as-pasta recipe he rates as his #1 lowcarb favorite recipe, which since his website is stuffed full of awesome recipes is probably really saying something.

I just wanted to mention kind of a trivial thing here.

Long before going lowcarb, before the carb thing was even a conscious issue for me, I had a problem with pasta. The problem was, even in my blood-sugar-oblivion of those days, I knew very well from repeat experience that pasta would make it spike and crash. For some reason, I could eat three times the carbs in other foods and not seem to have too major an effect, but eat pasta, and I would literally get dizzy and lightheaded, or if sitting down like on my bed with my laptop, might literally just pass out into sleep without ever going through the conscious decision to do that first. It was frightening.

Some time ago I bought “Dreamfields” pasta. This is said to be “lowcarb” pasta. It’s got hype all over the box, and all over the internet.

See the idea is that the processing of the grain makes the protein count much higher, and the fiber count much higher — rather like in Wheat Protein Isolate for example (a flour-type that products like CarbQuick utilize) — and hence, the resulting pasta made from that flour has enough of both to offset the more limited carb count and slow down its digestion so that it has a lesser impact on your blood sugar.

The problem is, for me, it doesn’t work.

I am not diabetic. I do seem to be insulin resistant. But there are only a couple of foods that so kick the ass of my blood sugar regulation that shortly after eating them I all but pass out, and pasta — even in limited doses — is one of them.

Since pasta with pesto was hands-down my favorite food in the universe next to pizza, the other food-that-will-kill-me as irony would have it, this is just SUCH a bummer.

I tried Dreamfield’s pasta. And I had the same blood sugar response as I get with regular pasta, basically. If it was reduced in any way, it was not measurable to me — since I’m not literally measuring the “high” of the blood sugar as diabetics do, merely reporting on my physical “nearly passed out” response to the later blood sugar drop.

I’ve heard other people report this on the lowcarb forums, including diabetics who were measuring: that Dreamfields pasta spiked their blood sugar in a way it was heavily advertised not to.

So, my 30-second hope that maybe teeeeny amounts of pasta on my higher-carb cycling days would be do-able were dashed.

But then….

Had to buy some pasta for a dinner I promised to make for the kid and her friend. Standing in the grocery, I see this pasta called Barilla Plus. Now, Barilla is the primary manufacturer of pasta in the world. They’ve probably induced more gradual diabetes than any corporation except the soda makers. But this “Plus” version, as I read it, appears to be the equivalent of Dreamfield’s: high protein, high fiber.

It doesn’t actually make any big deal about the lowcarb aspect, but that is the essential result, is less blood sugar impact from the carbs which is the whole point. So I figure since I have to buy something for the kids, I’ll try this — I’m mixing it with meat so hopefully they’ll at least have more protein.

Dinner — hamburger meat, newman’s spaghetti sauce, and penne pasta of the Barilla Plus variety, with parmesan cheese and some oregano on top — looked and smelled so amazingly good that I fell completely off the wagon and ate a bunch of it. Not just a little. A bunch.

Oddly, the “dizzy nearly passed out” feeling never happened. I felt perfectly normal and hours later, marveled.

Probably a fluke, I figured. And there was lots of meat in that dish to try and ‘balance’ the carbs better and… and it was probably a fluke. I’d love to use that excuse to try and explain why, about six hours later, I nuked a bunch of this concoction (which was very thick, between the meat and penne) and ate a whole plate of the stuff.

And still I had NONE of the “blood sugar crash and burn”-effect that I get with any other form of pasta — including dreamfields.

I ate some more of it the next day. For whatever reason, this ghoulash-like thick mix in the fridge called me like a siren — something that carbs in general don’t do, by the way, when I’m on lowcarb I am not really tempted by carby food in general. It just tasted really GOOD and was great as a quick heat-up munchie food. But still no measurable effect.

Here’s the more amazing thing. I ate two big portions of this one day, and another big portion of it the next day. And it did not seem to affect my ketosis at all.

Whether this is the meat, or the improvement of the pasta, I have no idea. But since even lowcarbers sometimes make pasta dishes for others, or have carb-cycling high-carb days, I thought I would mention this stuff.

Barilla Plus. Make it with white sauce and lots of chicken, or red sauce and lots of beef burger, if you must have it at all. (I’m sure the preference is not to have it at all, on lowcarb plans — especially if you are gluten-free!) Given that it didn’t make my blood sugar crash as-prepared, and didn’t seem to interfere with my ketosis, I think I may plan this as one of the foods I have on my higher-carb days — not in excess, just as a nice change.

I don’t really like the idea of programming myself to eat high-carb-variants, as I feel that sorta defeats the purpose of learning to eat well, but my kid is a pasta freak and it’s difficult for me to resist that particular temptation. From now on, if and when that might happen, I’m using that stuff instead.

It’s no surprise that sometimes lowcarb, in discussion, can become almost like a religion or something. For a ton of people, including me, lowcarb ’saved me’ and ‘has changed my life’. I’m sure you get the analogy. Anything that has that powerful an effect on people’s lives is going to at least occasionally be a hot-potato topic. (Not that we would dream of eating potatoes.) There’s “spirited debate”… at the least.

I care about the lowcarb ‘field’ online, because it’s mine, because meeting and communicating with others about it is important to me. I care about the lowcarb ‘image’ in media, because I deal with the social result of miseducation in others every day. I care about lowcarb eating ‘accuracy’ in practice, because I’ve come to understand how unhealthy eating can mess up lives, and because I’ve seen the grief and physical problems it has caused in people I care about. I just care about lowcarb, period, because I know how helpful lowcarb can be when done well.

Like any major “guiding force” in my life, I feel that I have certain physical, ethical, psychological, and behavioral obligations to meet concerning That Thing I Hold So True. When you love something, it is an honor to serve it. When you truly care about something, you care about more than the here/now of it. It becomes a larger topic; it becomes a way of life, a “path you walk”, a life-philosophy.

Recently I’ve been thinking about what this means to me, in the context of my communications online. The internet is the primary media doorway for legitimate lowcarb information. There are good books, but they are nearly buried in the quantity of bad books and misinformation. There is typical “media”, but it is so dominantly skewed in favor of money/corporatism rather than health, it’s more harm than help. What is left are people. One by one, and tens of thousands at a time, in giant ‘discussion forums’ and on blogs big and small, like this one.

After thinking about this for nearly two weeks, and thinking about what I would like to say and how I would like to say it, I think the best way is simply to present what I consider my own beliefs and ‘personal standards’ for “operating in the lowcarb world.” I am just one person, and perhaps others have different standards; well actually, they do, that much is obvious. But these are mine, for whatever it is worth to share them with my friends and potential-friends here on my blog.

Maybe if this kind of thing were considered by more folks on this road, there would be less controversy, contention and frustration in lowcarb’s internet homes.

Walking the Path: 10 Tenets of Online Lowcarbing

1. I will be honest about my practice of lowcarb.

• If I follow a given eating plan “except” some factors, I will say both clearly.
• If I implement other strategies, such as carb cycling or higher fat or lowered calories, I will say that clearly.
• If I don’t really follow a given eating plan, no matter how popular, I will not claim that I do.

I can easily put this in any forum ‘profile notes’, on a free blog page, or mention it in passing. If I fail to do this, I misrepresent both what I am doing, and what I am not doing. Lowcarb has enough misinformation, media-spawned confusion, and variants, that it doesn’t need me further murking-up the pool of clarity with an inability to just be plain and honest.

It’s me putting the food in my mouth–how hard can just being clear about it be?

2. I will be understanding about others’ practice of low or controlled carb.

• If someone is on the Burn the Fat eating plan rather than Protein Power, or South Beach rather than Atkins, I will not be so rude as to interfere with what works for them.
• Sometimes what works for us requires time and experimentation, so even if what they are doing is NOT working for them, that is for them to realize and do something about, not me. I can only ‘advise’ gently.
• I will share what works for me, but I will phrase this as ’sharing’ or ‘ideas’ when talking with others on different eating plans, not as preaching.

This is necessary to any degree of intelligent communication with other humans online, whether in forums, blogs or other. From diabetes to thyroid issues, everybody’s body is a little bit unique. What works for me isn’t what works for everybody.

Within what I consider “reason” (of something being at least potentially healthy for at least some people), I will respect that this is an individual path for all of us, and I will not mock, scold or scorn someone for choices they have the right to make for themselves.

3. Notwithstanding the above, I will not be a party to advice or environments that encourage people toward unhealthy and even seriously dangerous practices.

• Everybody has a different level of exposure to information, and a different level of understanding regarding nutrition. I will make an effort to share what I feel is valid information, for those new and enthusiastic souls who are still on a learning curve.
• I will not allow my own bad habits, such as eating unhealthy food on occasion, to become ‘justification’ for others new to lowcarb doing so. If I want to ingest nitrates or frankenfoods that’s my decision, and I can share good recipes, but counseling people new to lowcarb on why eating this crap is A-OK is not helping lowcarb or them either. Kicking the habit of eating crappy food is half the battle. If I’m selling them on why they don’t need to, that isn’t helping them, get real, that’s just selfish rationalization.
• Enthusiasm often substitutes for legitimacy in online environments and leads people down dark roads. If I see someone telling others to do something I think is unhealthy for everyone or anyone, such as eating 500 calories a day or starving entirely for example, I will share my contrary views. Politely but clearly, so people have no reason to have a bad association with the info I provide.

Nobody is an expert instantly. I will not willingly allow people new to lowcarb, or who are clearly not familiar with basic tenets of health, to be misled into unhealthy behaviors without at least providing my own input as an alternative.

The decision may be theirs, but for that to have any meaning, they must have some alternatives from which to choose.

4. I will put health and honesty before personal ego or profit.

• When two people use an eating plan and one does not get the same results, it means they are not the same human, is all. If one acts like the other is lying or cheating, it means they are more vested in their plan being “right” than in anybody’s health. I will avoid such behavior, and point it out when I see it in others.
• Should I have the opportunity to acquire something of value to me based on my communications about lowcarb, from a job to advertising monies to editorial rights to internet ’staff’ authority, I will use it for good, not evil. I will consider the first three “points of the path” to be even more important in direct correlation with how big an influence I may have on others.
• I will strenuously avoid anything even close to a conflict of interest, and I will openly disclose, such as in a constant signature, any formal affiliations I have with any group, company or organization which might potentially bias my communications.
• If I cannot avoid some major conflict of interest, such as blogging about something that pays me for example, I will make a blog just for that, I will point out clearly near the top what my association / affiliation is, and I will not attempt to run what might amount to “blogverts” (blog posts) or forum posts under the heading of allegedly balanced reporting on a personal blog. If I’m making a serious profit off it or my ego or reputation is tied to it, then it cannot be considered truly unbiased by any stretch.

There is enough misinformation and conflicts of interest in the mainstream media and mainstream medicine. Do I really need to add to that with my own brand of lowcarb greed or disingenuity?

I want to help the lowcarb online world online toward clarity in all areas–not muddy it for my own potentially selfish purposes.

5. I will not abuse any ‘power’ that my lowcarb communications give me.

• If I keep a blog, and I allow anonymous (which can also just mean “doesn’t have a blogger account”) comments, I will not then verbally abuse people for using that option.
• If I keep a blog, and I allow comments, I will not refuse to post comments with critique (or only post comments with critique that say, ‘you probably won’t post this’, to make it look like I’m honest, but then withhold others). There is a difference between spam/trolls and honest if snarky or angry feedback. For me to “secretly editorialize” by only letting certain comments through would be to essentially lie to all my blog readers by misrepresenting the actual interaction on my blog. This completely contradicts the whole nature of honest blogging and I will not be a party to that.
• If I blog something, and someone comments negatively on it, and I choose to change that blog content, I will make a note in the blog post itself, such as striking out the old text and then saying, “Edited to:” and then putting the new text. I will not change my text without notice once someone has commented on that part of the text. I will especially not then pretend a commenter was deluded or wrong for having commented on “what I didn’t say” if in fact, I had definitely said it when they made the comment. That is not just violating ‘honest blogger ethics’, it’s a form of blog-fraud. I won’t do it.
• If I should be given staff power in any website, whether one of my own or one I work with owned by someone else, I will not modify the content of anybody else’s online materials, such as for example taking a negative comment toward me, and rewriting it into a positive comment toward me. This is not mere ‘lack of honesty’, this is actual fraud. I won’t do it.

Communication is all that exists on the internet. If communication cannot be trusted to be honest according to its own alleged policies, that internet outlet is more harm than help to lowcarb as a whole. This kind of thing is sometimes buried in a lot of hype and volume and popularity, but eventually, net-karma comes around.

Staff, editors and bloggers who behave that way will get less support and respect in the very community where that ought to matter most, and to the very people, such as leaders of the field, to whom their reputation as low-carb media online ought to matter most.

6. If I must complain, I will attempt to do so based on issues, not personalities.

• If person A is a numbskull for suggesting the Cinnamon Toothpick Diet as a healthy alternative to weight loss, I will not attack person A for being a numbskull. Rather, I will attack the Cinnamon Toothpick Diet for being moronically unhealthy. There is a difference, no matter that these things might be related.
• If Person B has a history and presentation that suggests somewhere there is probably fraud, based on things like their student-success-stories seeming like doctored photos, their own timeline of claims being inconsistent, their own bizarre refusal for years to share evidence of their much-vaunted success, or their own before and after photos appearing to be different people and/or reverse age-dates, then I will pick on all those issues as I wish, but I’ll pick on the issues, not the person.
• It is not my job to stalk Person A or B because I ’suspect’ he or she is a cheat, liar, fraud, idiot, etc. It is however perfectly within my rights to question and discuss those “issues” in the lowcarb community at large. Should it turn out those issues find proof, I would then be within my rights to report the person to authorities or expose them in my media, but it still would not be because of the person, it would be because of the issues. Stalking is personal. Issues are not.
• If someone disagrees with me on a forum, I will take this to mean they disagree with me. I will not take this to mean they woke up this morning determined to ruin my day because they are evil. Debates, no matter how spirited, do not need to be personal. If they are about ‘perspective’ (opinion) and not ‘facts’ (information), then yes, they might get a *little* personal, but I will try to refrain from calling people numbskulls. In public, anyway.
• If I choose to post something on my blog about an issue making me mad and centered on an individual place or person, I will address the issue at large. If I call someone or something a name, it will be something that I simply feel communicates, with humor, my opinion. Such as “Kimorexia” for the insane-lowcal plan variants (and constant advice toward that and fasting) in the Kimkins diet, or “the Fatzi Regime” for the overwhelming cultural bias against fat people. I will not however address individual people or places as Nazis or SOBs because, well, that would be juvenile and ridiculous. One is a statement on a thing; the other is a statement on people.

Conversation with ten other people is difficult enough, never mind with 10,000 other people on a forum. Lowcarb is a great thing, and most self-education people get about it besides a few books, is via online forums and blogs, so keeping those forums and blogs to the point of education instead of nasty flames or abuse, is important.

People do not learn from information packaged in a post that offends them.

7. I will work to walk the fine line of supporting people who need it, yet not supporting dysfunctional or addictive behavior.

• I am happy to encourage someone to keep on, to start anew, to recognize what they do well. I will not however let my time get sucked into someone repeatedly whining about how they just can’t get their act together for their health. I am sorry about that, and I’ll work to be a good model and supporter, but I’ll not become an internet codependent for their issues. It doesn’t help either of us.
• I will be honest about what I think, within the bounds of diplomacy a given environment requires. If I think someone really should read the damn book before asking everyone to sum up 300 pages in a forum sound-byte, I will say so. I do lowcarb and its people no service by catering to those who refuse to bother with self-education. That mentality is doomed from the start anyway.
• If I think person A is being unfair to person B, I will make a point to say so if I have time. Both people and all onlookers only know the views of those who share. Too often, people think the world is against them just because one person disagreed in a poor way and nobody else said anything. I will work to be sensitive to how people feel about this kind of thing and to support people who need it when I can.
• I will work to understand and support that people have unique metabolism and biochemistry issues, lose weight at different rates, and even need or don’t need to “fall off the wagon” at different rates. A young person who is busy and lives alone can often do lowcarb far more easily than an older sedentary person who has a house filled with junk for their spouse and others and constant church/social/family eating environments. That is just the way it is. I admire anybody who “keeps on keeping on” with their dietary plan; perfection with it is admirable, but since lifestyles are as different as bodies, it is not fair to bias against those who aren’t perfect.
• I will take full responsibility for my own decisions. If I blow it and eat crappy food, it’s because I chose to. Usually the reason has more to do with eating properly in the 48 hours prior to that decision, than it has to do with the ‘event’ of the decision itself, and anybody lowcarbing for very long ought to realize that. But the decision was mine. I will own my decisions and not try to project responsibility for them onto family members, birthday parties, etc.

Strength of character is part of result of accomplishment in lowcarb as well as anything else. We get nowhere by playing the victim. If we eat well and weight loss is slow or worse, that is fair to whine about. If we choose to eat pizza every 10 days and weight loss is slow or worse, that’s our own doing.

Responsibility is the key to power.

8. I will attempt to promote lowcarb in a way that matches the environments I choose.

• Online forums and blogs all have their own ‘mood’. No forum is required to give free reign to people who don’t communicate in a way that meets their standards. They own it, that’s policy. It’s no different than going into the house of someone of a different culture, or religion: while in Rome, do as the Romans do, as the saying goes. I will not use the F-word in comments on family-natured blogs, and I will not be harshly snarky in kinder-gentler forums, although I might do either in areas where that is more appropriate.
• If I am in the no-carb forum I will not wax on about the glory of Broccoli and avocados. They do not care and they don’t really want to hear it. If I’m in the low-carb forum I will not wax on about why vegetables are pointless and unnecessary. They are low-carb using veggies for what they get, not no-carb. If I’m in the journal of someone doing the South Beach diet, I will not wax on about why even brown rice sucks for blood sugar. This is just not the time or place. Being ’supportive’ in an inappropriate place usually equates to being argumentative or even a troll. All things in balance.

Even inside the low-, no- and controlled- carb “field” on the internet, there are substantially different approaches. It is possible to support them all, or at least ignore the ones of no interest, without offending others. A lot of people desperately depend on the ideas, education and support they get online. Online-warfare drives a lot of people off, and this can literally affect their likelihood of staying on plan.

Communication is supposed to be for at least two people. If it’s only for me, it’s just self-absorption.

9. I will not willingly or openly support individuals, companies, groups or products which I feel either do harm to lowcarb, or violate the most basic tenets of online decency that the lowcarb field has a right to expect and well deserves.

• If I consider a forum’s staff abusive, I will not link to them or participate on their boards.
• If I consider a blogger’s behavior unethical, I will not link to them or participate in their comments.
• If I consider a company or product to be unhealthy or unethically promoted, I will not link to them or let pass their promotion without comment.

There is a saying that goes something like, “The only thing that is required for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.” As big a pain in the butt as it sometimes is, and as politically incorrect as it sometimes is, I feel morally obliged to do something. Maybe not loudly, maybe not abusively, maybe not while naming names, because I wish to focus on issues, behavior and facts more than personalities.

I will not be a passive party to wrongdoing or things I feel are a detriment to lowcarb’s media, online field or communications.

10. I will constantly work to see the positive in the eating plan that is healthy for me, and I will attempt to use any influence I have to display the positive and the healthy.

• I will not whine about the fact that I cannot have rice, or apple pie. I will rejoice in the fact that cauliflower can make a mock ‘chicken fried rice’ that rocks, that zucchini can make a mock ‘apple cobbler’ tht rocks, and do my best to share recipes and enthusiasm both online and offline.
• I will not whine about the fact that eating Gluten causes me allergic response and gluten-free flours are high-carb. (Ok… not much. :-)) I will instead work on finding and coming up with great lowcarb recipes that are also gluten free and share them with others.
• I will not whine about the fact that at least mild exercise is eventually needed for decent ongoing weight loss, muscle retention, and general health. I will instead work to find whatever level and type of it I am capable of doing, and share my enthusiasm with others about it. Even if I have to manufacture enthusiasm nightly to get myself to pick up that dumbbell.
• I will not whine about how lowcarb is just so hard because the world surrounds me with sugar/carb-laden foods and food-based holidays. Everybody is in that situation. The Amish and Vegetarians and Kosher folks manage to eat what they should despite other things calling their names, so why should it be so much more unfair for lowcarbers? If I want sweet crepes and ice cream I will do my best to find or create a lowcarb version of this that allows me to feel pampered and decadent, while not screwing up my health or that of others I’m feeding it to.

Lowcarb isn’t a food prison, it’s an amazing opportunity to truly explore a lot of awesome food choices here on “God’s Green Earth” that most of us completely missed in our Mac&Cheese/McDonalds upbringings. But for most people new to it, or those who have operated mostly alone rather than in big online forums, it can be a sort of sad food experience. This is their lack of education about what is possible, is all, and I can help improve that. That doesn’t mean I’ll never have a recipe with a processed food ingredient in it. It just means I’ll work very hard to have recipes, instead of references to packaged lowcarb junkfoods.

I want to provide encouragement and enthusiasm to others about eating real, healthy foods that not only taste good but do good for their bodies.

There’s probably some things I left out. But these are the ten primary tenets that I consider most important to online interaction concerning lowcarb.

If you like them, link to them, to “remind” others. Or make your own.

I think it’s a worthy effort. The more we care about the ‘online lowcarb field’, the healthier IT is likely to be.

Bodybuilders may be experts at losing fat, but I am an expert at gaining it. Gee I wonder if I could relocate to Africa and be a high paid consultant for the cultures that consider fat beautiful.

I outlined a new eating plan for myself previously based on doing the exact opposite of what I did to get so fat. It’s a great plan. Except that because it’s more about sanity and moderation, neither area being a strong point for me obviously, I very shortly failed to be on any plan at all.

This was followed by my attempts to work out a carb-calorie-fat cycling plan based on Tom Venuto’s plan. That whole percentage thing ended up so complicated to work out my menus for that I gave up. So from January to mid-May I had no plan, gained a little back, mostly water weight, and I am nearly back to where I left off. It’s aggravating to have to keep “retracing” steps I already worked hard for.

Friends and I were talking the other day about how the long “stalls” people claim really should probably be considered “maintenance for awhile” in some cases. When people can’t really focus/plan/cook/eat/exercise as they need to for losing weight, but they are at least not relapsing into cultural lousy eating habits, it isn’t really a failure to lose weight, but a success in staying on plan and NOT gaining any. No matter how long it takes to gradually lose weight, if one is not gaining it, it could definitely be worse. I’m here to tell you… it could be worse.

o0o

With the wisdom of hindsight, I now understand that anything “sane” and “moderate” will not work for me at the moment, because if I am not “forced to pay close attention and count stuff,” then I am simply not paying enough attention, period. Attention, intention, and expectation are critical to the success of anything. I’m very driven by what’s in my head… I’m convinced that my weight loss is not just a matter of numbers but a matter of what I want to create in my reality.

I also admit that I have not been particularly good at following any plan at all. That I have done ok losing weight can probably be chalked up solely to the fact that I weighed so damn much to begin with.

Problems: I don’t eat often enough, and don’t eat enough protein, enough calories, or even enough carbs (since I usually do want to stay in a certain range) most days. This is a combination of factors. First, that most of my life I didn’t eat until night, and so it’s easy for me to shine on or just forget to eat until late afternoon or evening. Second, that I’m lazy and tend to fail to plan and fail to prepare, resulting in me not having food available when I am working or otherwise busy, so I end up skipping food since I haven’t time to cook and don’t want to eat off-plan.

I know that a lot of people who have problems eating too much, or binging, or craving carbs, probably dream of having my problem. But the reality is that I got this fat greatly thanks to the ’starvation response’ to begin with. I’ve often tracked my food alongside someone else’s who weighed like 1/4 – 1/3 what I did, and eaten the same things, same quantities, and not lost weight. That’s why I get so irked when people act like if someone is morbidly obese they must just be daily ingesting 3 pounds of bon-bons so gosh, if they’d just stop that, surely all would be well. Obviously between body metabolism, food allergens, eating frequency and more, there are other considerations.

But I am determined to set a goal and a standard, and just work toward achieving that. For the remainder of my 12 week cycle (about 9 1/2 weeks), I am going to EXPERIMENT with a carb cycling ketogenic diet. Let’s see how it works. My weight chart is online, I’ll add in my CCKD info somewhere so if there is a correlation after a few weeks of it, between loss/gain/unchanged, maybe it will be apparent to all.

o0o

Big Daddy D started a carb cycling plan after hearing me talk about this many months ago. He posted results that he had. It is SO invaluable for lowcarbers to actually experiment with this stuff, and document the results. If we don’t do this kind of experimentation, it just isn’t done, or isn’t known to us.

I am using a TWO WEEK CYCLE (14 days). Technically I’m beginning 6/1 tomorrow, but the start of ‘week 1′ on the cycling plan actually begins Monday 6/4.

Life is an experiment. I have proved fabulously successful at the unintentional Getting Hugely Fat experiment. Now I want to continue my trials in the Getting Vastly Thinner experiment. If this doesn’t work, I’ll do something else. But I think it will. Now that I have everything — food journal, weight tracking, exercise tracking — publicly on googledocs for anybody to see, I guess everybody will be able to see just how successful (or not!) I might turn out to be with the new experiment. Wish me luck. ;-)

The low-fat crazed world is convinced that my eggs in the morning and my pork stew is going to kill me, sooner rather than later. If the official party line about health had any truth to it, I would have already expired from veins clogged solid and blood pressure in the stratospheric count.

But funny enough, even in the lowcarb world, there’s a whole cornucopia of warning labels people hang out for education. And they are probably all correct. But as a friend of mine pointed out, sometimes it seems there is no end to it!

A talk came up about yummy chorizo. Which led to my pointing out it is pig lymph nodes, which are the toxin collectors of the body, and I find it too gross to eat.

So I eat Soyrizo, a substitute that is nearly indistinguishable from chorizo. But this leads to posts about the many deadly dangers of humans ingesting soy.

OK, so maybe a reader thinks, “OK then! I’ll have some bacon or sausage with those eggs instead.” But no, then you get to hear about all the terrible nitrites in those.

“Ok, ok!” our fictional lowcarber protests. “Then I’ll just have a small burger patty, that’s simple and quick.” But wait, there’ll be a whole page about how well-cooked meats are not so good for you and really we should be eating them nearly raw.

(And don’t even THINK of doing serious reading about Mad Cow Syndrome or you may never eat meat again.)

“That does it!” you hear. “I’ll just have a freakin protein drink already!” No babe, don’tcha know, that is PROCESSED and not really “food”?!

***

And this is on top of the fact that most anything that ever even thought about being a grain, mating with a grain, or residing in the same package as a grain, is probably doing damage to a huge chunk of the population through grain/gluten intolerance.

Oh yeah, and about a zillion people are sensitive to caseine, the protein in milk.

And if you make all those yummy foods you’re using artificial sweetener. You just know that no matter how great sucralose (what’s in splenda) seems today, in 10 years (if that) we’ll be hearing about how it kills you.

But wait, there’s more. Turns out there’s plenty of suggestion that merely the sweet “taste” of something can cause insulin spikes by association.

For godssakes! So we have Pavlov’s Pancreas, too. Great.

***

Recently I posted here about making processed foods in the home — using eggs, butter, protein powder, flax seed meal, etc. etc. to create high-protein cocoa muffins, for example. I was saying, is it any worse to do that, than to have eggs fried in butter, a teaspoon of flax seeds and a protein drink? If so, why?

Here on the blog the comments were like, hey whatever keeps you on plan. On my LC journal the comments were more like, that’s the wrong direction man, you should be eating real food.

But most ‘real food’ isn’t portable in a ziplock without refrigeration for a couple of days, for instant-grab yummy munchy food that is also good numbers for my daily eating goals. And eating muffins, or mock danish as a friend of mine does (and she certainly lost weight), regularly, doesn’t mean one is not also eating meat and veggies.

It might mean, though, that you stayed on-plan.

Though I guess, maybe it wasn’t a very good plan. Maybe.

***

I think in a perfect world, we would all live on turkey, broccoli, pecans, avocados, and some fresh herbs and lots of water. (I’m ignoring the many things that could be warnings, even about those.)

But in the real world, I don’t have a butler, so I live on what I had the time, money, and energy to make for myself. The easier something is to make, the longer something lasts, and the easier it is to eat the leftovers, the higher a rating it gets in my Worthy Foods Book.

I think the better people get at eating ‘real food’, the healthier they’re likely to be. Then again, if food or time or money or frankly, energy to do something proactive is limited — or appetite, or foods you’re not sensitive to or don’t dislike, are limited — then you take what you’ve got.

You do the best you can with the options available to you, and hope to live another day to work toward that perfect-world dietary plan. Chances are, soy and chorizo and bacon and processed protein powder are not going to kill you done in moderation.

Obesity, however, is pretty damn dangerous. (And miserable if you ask me.)

If eating protein donut holes or a mock danish every day for a year is your idea of a high protein breakfast, well, if it helped keep you on plan, got you enough protein, kept down your carbs, kept down your calories if necessary, and helped you lose some of that fat, then I’d say it turned out to be a good thing, didn’t it?

Who knows? Less weight and sufficient protein for the long term might mean more energy for more focus on whole roasted chickens in your future.

Wait, don’t tell me. That stuff will KILL me, because . . .

Today I’ve been thinking about processed foods. I’m not talking about Pasteurized Process American Cheese Food kind of processed foods, or even the Double Quarter Pounder With Cheese kind of processed food. I’m talking about the potential difference — or not? — between foods I make in my kitchen, versus well, foods I just eat, maybe with minimal prep. And whether one is better or worse. Is it the ingredients? The % of processed ingredients in the overall product resulting? The morality of “raw” vs… whatever?

I think I’m a guilt-freak and I’m trying to figure out if I should feel guilty about making concoctions out of stuff like protein powder, flax, eggs, cream cheese, like, “You should be eating chicken and salad! There’s no excuse!” or whether I should say “Hey, it tastes good, it has good nutrient-numbers, it keeps me on plan, so it’s good.”

There is a ‘ground base’ we could start with. Vegetables and fruits. If you buy them fresh, or better yet pick them fresh, that’s as close to unprocessed as you can get. So we all assume that this is the best thing in the world, right? Assuming the veggie or fruit is not so sugar/starch laden that it functions like nature’s pasta once it hits your innards. And of course fresh spices, which rock.

Then we move to ‘mildly affected’ foods. I go to the butcher shop which sells me the 1/4 of a side of beef from a local grass-fed farmer’s cow just taken a couple days before, and he gives me a bunch of frozen shrink-sealed stuff that looks vaguely like a frightening science experiment, perhaps some new version of The Blob that too much time thawing on my counter could unleash on my innocent small town, but I know it will look like meat when unpackaged. Before I eat this, I have to cook it, no matter what my cats think of this uncivilized practice. So that is somewhat processed but it is “mostly” unchanged. I think.

What about seeds I grind? Surely a flax seed in 412 eeeny-weensy pieces is no less healthy than a flax seed whole? Is a flax seed eaten plain vs. mixed into a protein drink vs. baked in a muffin any different?

Then we move to processed foods. First, the dairy. I use cream, half & half, sour cream, cream cheese, cottage cheese, blue cheese, cheddar cheese, ok let’s just be clear, I pretty much worship cheese in every form it may come in, not counting cheap American processed cheese food in little plastic wrapped slices which I consider an affront to the Cheese God that I will not abide. To be fair, hard cheeses are only processed in their root creation, far as I know; however all the other dairy stuff is pasteurized at the least, homogenized probably.

I’m not sure what either of those are in detail except according to my father, who spent his childhood swiping the big lump of cream at the top of milk bottles on the way to school in the morning from around the mid-40s to mid-50s, it has something to do with why he can’t do that anymore. How his stories of luscious cream in the frosty cold mesh with his other stories of walking 2 miles to school barefoot in the snow with only a hard biscuit for lunch is beyond me, but these are the mysteries of parenthood. I have already assured my ten year old that the tragic deprivation of my childhood makes any complaint she may have for the next 8 years pointless and whiney. Dad taught me well.

I’m not really sure what difference that processing makes. My friends used to have ‘raw milk’. I thought it tasted disgusting. Another friend drinks skim milk. To me this tastes like I imagine lapping up the dregs of my cat’s water dish might. I am a whole milk kinda girl, although I can deal with 2%/1% if I must. Not just whole but even the somewhat intensified milk that Braum’s sells, as they are the dairy slash fast food milk source of my choice. This is because it tastes awesome.

(But to be honest, it’s also because super walmart, in their attempt to sell me 114.7 items I did not intend to shop for, puts the milk literally at the other end of the store away from the front door. They oughtta have quarter mile markers in that store, it’s so big. If it were much bigger, it would cross the state line. I really like milk but I am just not making that much effort for it frankly.) Now that I’m VLC (very low carb) again, milk is out, which since it causes a craving response in me and I’m probably allergic to it in some bizarre way, is for the best.

So ok, dairy products are generally processed but I assume this processing is mostly just making them (a) fit to drink, (b) infused with vitamin D so my programmer / project manager “mole” lifestyle without sun is compensated for, and (c) less likely to kill me from some side effect of industrial dairy cow farming that I had not foreseen. Is it bad that they are processed like that? I don’t know. I don’t seem to have much choice in the matter though. My cream does not come with variants like “non”-homogenized. Is dairy technically a processed food?

Next we move on to the severely processed. Let’s start with my favorite frankenfood: Low Carb Slim Fast drink in the can. 190 calories. 10.5g fat. 4 carbs, 2 fiber carbs, 2ecc, 20g protein. Plus a buncha vitamins. You cannot beat those numbers. After even my super walmart abandoned the LC version in favor of the omnipresent “Optima-reduces appetite!” version (with lowfat and 2g protein?! how does it do that?), I had to order it from Amazon. According to my estimates I need to buy stock in Slim-Fast’s parent company, since a hefty chunk of my limited single-mom income is going toward it for the next 7.2 centuries, which is how long I expect my weight loss to take. No, I am NOT on a slim-fast diet, before anybody keels over with the horror of it. It’s simply that I am trying to eat lots of times a day, I need a ton of protein a day, and I loathe protein powder. I can mix protein powder in with a slimfast and actually get it down my throat though, so it is helpful to have in my daily intake.

Is it bad to drink the stuff? Oddly the LC version has a lot less chemicals on the ingredients list than the other I compared it to some months ago. If it’s the difference between not having a meal (which is my biggest problem: not having food ready in advance, not having time to make it when I’m working, etc.) then I figure it served a noble purpose, despite its processing.

OK now we get to home made stuff.

Let’s say I take some eggs, and some cream, and some ground up flax seeds, and some protein powder, and some cocoa (Penzeys.com 24% high butterfat dutched!), and some sweetener (fiberfit and sweetzfree), and some almond oil, and some hazelnut flour (lower carb than almond flour), and I mix it all together in a bowl and then I bake it, for my cocoa muffins v1.8. The protein powder is very processed. The cream is pastur-homogo-something’d, and I’m sure the cocoa has gone through more processing than Liz Taylor’s face. The flax seeds were ground up. But hey the eggs were pure!

OK so pop quiz: is it healthier for me to eat this that I make in my kitchen, than to eat something with similar ingredients I buy at the store? (No, it doesn’t exist at the store. Humor my example.) Aside from maybe a single preservative ingredient or something, would there really be a difference?

If I am told to “avoid processed foods”, does this mean that my combination of ingredients (ranging from pure to excessively processed), mixed and baked into some chemical conglomerate that even my kid likes (which only proves it’s probably killing us from the inside out, given her other tastes), is a “higher grade, but still processed, food”?

Is it better for me to eat my eggs scrambled, vs. mixed up in a breadish, because they are less processed that way? Or is the fact that my breadishes are composed of protein, flax, nuts, etc. sufficiently redeeming?

Should I feel guilty about having many dozens of liquid flavorings/extracts, nearly three dozen flavors of DaVinci sugarfree syrups, “alternative sugars” in like 9 different forms, NOT/Starch etc. for thickening — all pretty close to totally artificial ingredients? Am I losing dietary brownie points for eating things that were not one with God within the last 48 hours?

I want to quote this great passage from Dr. Michael Eades’ blog about natural vs. well, unnatural, foods:

There is so much hype about the crappiness of the standard American diet crawling with processed foods of every stripe that it is easy to fall victim to the if-it’s-organic-it-must-be-healthful con. Homemade ice cream with organic cream and organic sugar and home grown fruit seems so much more wholesome than store-bought, but your pancreas can’t tell the difference. If you eat it (in large quantities) they will come. ‘They’ being enlarged fat cells and hyperinsulinemia. And ‘they’ come whether it’s ‘organic’ or not. (Again, were I planning on going face down in the ice cream, I would prefer it made with ‘wholesome’ ingredients, but I wouldn’t fool myself that my pancreas wasn’t going to pay the price.)

So theoretically is my Low Carb Slimfast a better choice than frozen corn and peas microwaved? ‘Cause even though the latter are “real food” and “natural,” they’ll kick pancreas butt better than an LC cheesecake will?

Speaking of LC cheesecake, how are they? I don’t know. I’ve made three tiny ones (enough for 2 ramikens) but unfortunately, my hand, the spoon, and my mouth, conspire to eat it out of the Magic Bullet blender cup before it ever gets to the ramikens to bake. I would trade sex for the stuff it’s so good. I haven’t made it in eons because I think I like it too well. There has to be something sinful about anything I feel that passionate about.

Tonight’s food: Godzilla Burgers. A replay on the hamburger mixed with some mustard, worcestershire, oregano, and Gorgonzola crumbled cheese. I’m hoping to make several and freeze a few and fridge a couple. My kid loves these.

Tonight’s experiment: a sweetish that started out called ‘protein powder donut holes’, moved into ‘LC funnel cakes’, sidestepped to another form of ‘waffles’, etc. Most lowcarb recipes like this are actually “concept recipes”, much like the flax bowl muffin or mock danish or pizza quiche, which you can modify like a mad scientist. There is an original, then variant versions, and four pages of raving, at the lowcarber.org forum, link here.

Now there’s that guilt again. “It’s fried!” Maybe I can use coconut oil. Trying to get more calories and fat in my diet anyway and it’s ridiculously hard. It’s dominantly egg, butter, protein powder. If it’s encouraged for me to eat eggs fried in butter, coconut oil in my coffee, and protein powder drinks, is it less healthy for me to eat something vaguely akin to a fried pastry? I mean, if I were putting a little sweetzfree or splenda in my coffee nobody’d comment, so adding it to my fried-thing shouldn’t matter.

Is it like a matter of “the moral of it” — morning coffee, protein drink and eggs are somehow inherently better than all of those ingredients (except the coffee) in a different form? I mean is it just WRONG for me if I were to adopt some recipe (using this one as an example) that is “homemade processed food” and eat that quite a lot, rather than fresh veggies and steak?

I guess my point is that recommendations from others in LC-land sometimes seem a bit contradictory or pollyanna and I’m wondering what “really” matters.

The last month+ I’ve been doing a lot of reading, thinking, evaluating what I am doing as far as health and fitness goes, and where I want to go from here.

I actually have had so much I wanted to talk about that I just didn’t know how to condense it from novel-length to blog post length. I probably can’t.

I think what I should do, is go through my mental process over the last month+, so y’all are on the same page with me.

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I admit that when I began on a lowcarb eating plan, I didn’t have much in mind at first except “surviving.” I didn’t think I’d live another year (or even quarter) if I didn’t do something immediately. So anything that made me able to move a little better, breathe a little better, feel a better, was what I should be doing. Lowcarb is ideal in that situation. It has such a fast water/glycol loss right off the top, that a person almost instantly has more energy, feels more limber, just what you need for finding hope for your future, finding the energy to keep-on keeping-on, finding the courage to hope that maybe something can change.

The initial weight loss following that part is probably as much lean body mass as fat, as there do seem to be limits on the speed of fat loss without lean loss, and initial lowcarb done at a high weight exceeds that by several orders of magnitude. But for most of us that is trivia: getting enough weight off fast enough that the imminent threat of keeling over is reduced, long enough to let us do something more medium-term proactive about our health, has to be the focus.

Once I began losing weight, I told myself that when I had lost 100 lbs, I would re-consider whatever I was doing, and do something about exercise. I knew that rapid weight loss, especially without major exercise, wasn’t ideal. Or in the words of Richard Atkins, “Exercise is non-negotiable.” But when I first began lowcarb, I could barely step up on a curb. I couldn’t even stand, let alone walk, for more than 30 seconds without exhaustion and back pain. So it had to wait until I’d lost enough weight to be able to move decently.

As I neared the 100# mark, I began to be a little more aware of my body and what it could do than I used to be. On one hand, my increased energy, flexibility, and ability to MOVE, had improved my life in so many ways. On the other hand, I kept feeling that I was losing strength. One day, for 2-3 days, I would be able to do some new thing I hadn’t been able to do before, such as nimbly bounce up my porch steps with no handrail, no two-feet-per-step, no groaning major effort on the top step (which is higher than the others). Then suddenly it would be so much harder, if not impossible. At first would think, “Maybe I’m a little low in protein or something,” or, “Well everyone has stronger or weaker days,” but protein and water didn’t seem to change it. I began to feel like I was constantly encountering a two-part event: first I would lose a little more weight, feel a little better, get a little stronger; then I would get a little weaker, feel a little less energetic… though the scale would show I’d lost a little more weight. I started developing this superstition of sorts that I was losing muscle. That my rapid weight loss combined with no serious exercise to speak of, was gradually wearing away my lean body mass. I couldn’t think of anything else that would explain why most all the gains I seemed to make in strength, were promptly reversed.

Just over a month ago, I increased my protein, without increase of calories or carbs. Instantly, I started gradually — literally daily — gaining weight. This didn’t bother me really, because I felt better rather than worse, and even while this was happening, my rings were falling off my smaller hand, so I put them on the other, and then they were falling off the other hand–it was clear I was reducing. What I suspected was that I had some wasted but not fully gone muscle, which the added protein was salvaging. This contributed to my suspicion that maybe I really was losing lean body mass, and needed to do something about the exercise issue.

So I thought about it really hard. Heh. How many calories does thought burn?

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Right at the 100# mark, things started changing. I wonder if part of this is subconscious, because I had such focus on that number. First, the weight loss slowed greatly and then stopped, although I had not done anything differently. I’d thought perhaps certain things I was eating (such as flax muffins) might relate, so cut them out, but it didn’t seem to matter. Now, for many many years I have maintained and gained weight on only a fraction of the calories my BMR allegedly needs. So I know my body; I know it adapts quickly to some homeostasis that will maintain me, and that is my doom.

For over a month now, my weight has varied. I am unable to see any real pattern in it that would tell me it was water, PMS, protein or whatever. For the first time since starting lowcarb, I have felt sort of removed from the scale, as if I can no longer track how I feel against the numbers it shows me. For my blog I wait until the weight settles so I feel it’s consistent, then I post the new weight and an updated history of the scale. So far it hasn’t settled, wandering around a 20# variance in a way that is pretty confusing.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I have weighed and measured. I currently weigh more than I did a month ago (though like I said, it varies). But here’s the interesting thing: All of my measurements have continued to go down. So even though my weight has slightly increased, the size of my body has consistently been DEcreasing. For example, from January 8 to January 18, I gained four pounds. But I lost an inch on my hips, 3/4 inch on my waist, 1.5 inch on my upper thigh, 1.75 inch on my calve. (I didn’t measure other parts.) So… even though it seems like I am gaining weight and that should frighten me, I’m getting smaller and that delights me. Doing both at the same time does seem a little weird, I admit.

But I think this is where body composition comes into the picture. (Meaning, how much of your body is fat vs. anything else.) I saw this photo recently (how I wish I could find it again to show you) that a woman posted, a before and after picture. She was doing weight training and cardio workouts between the time of the two pictures. In one, she is vastly thinner, firmer, stronger, obviously more healthy, very impressive. The difference on the scale? Three pounds. That’s it. Because she was gaining muscle and losing fat (more back & forth than simultaneously), the scale barely changed at all. Her body certainly did though! It sort of emphasized to me that my focus on scale-weight is shortsighted. If I am losing muscle, that’s nothing to be proud of. That’s a bad thing, not a good thing. I should be focused on my body fat %, at least to the degree I can estimate such things, not on the scale. Losing lean mass reduces metabolism, slows weight loss, decreases energy and strength, and in general is the last thing I should want to do.

Ironically, I believe that most people who get really really fat, as I did, actually start the process with exactly this. If you don’t eat enough calories, the metabolism slows down to match that. If you don’t eat often enough, the body slows down metabolism to deal with perceived starvation. Without enough protein, the lean body mass decreases, further reducing metabolism. The thyroid output reduces and further slows your metabolic rate. Then, even eating the same too-small number of calories a day can cause weight gain rather than maintenance, as impossible as the numbers make that seem. Then eat your food in one meal, and you’re sure to over-carb and over-calorie, storing more fat daily even if you’re eating half your BMR in calories, because you can’t burn it all off in one sitting. (Eating right before bed, as I did, is the worst.) Add to that stress, sleep deprivation, nutritional deficiencies, food allergens, and a variety of other issues known to impact metabolism, and weight loss/gain, and you have a perfect setup for gradually but consistently adding a LOT of weight to a body. One thing is sure: I may be no expert on weight loss, but I am certainly a master at weight gain.

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So in January, I took some extra time to read a ton of archives of the lowcarber forum, and a couple others on that topic, encountering en-masse the personal stories of lowcarbers dating back years sometimes. When you read something all at once like this, you tend to be a lot more impacted by what seem to be “trends” than you would otherwise; you probably wouldn’t even notice certain things otherwise, not without someone running statistics for you. But the “mega-dose” of reading a bulk of something all at once, will bring to your attention repeating elements. Some of the repeating elements were things that really bothered me; worried me, made me feel like there were some problems that were clearly common in our lowcarb world and yet, nobody really seemed to be dealing with them openly. It is as if lowcarb was this philosophy, we were all in it together, and it would be sacrilege to point out something that was a problem, even though pointing it out is no diss on LC at all!, just an observation of something that obviously needs tweaking or further consideration.

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1. People regularly complained of long stalls. I don’t mean long like a month. I mean long like 4-18 months. In the lowcarb world, the response amounted to what I would dryly compare to, “Just have faith.” Well, I have faith in God, but I don’t have faith in stalls. Lowcarb is not a religion. (Although to hear some forum discussions, you might be surprised!) As the saying I like best goes, “If what you’re doing isn’t working, do something else.” If they were not losing weight but they were losing size or constantly feeling better, that would not really be a stall. A stall is where nothing particularly useful is happening. Why anybody would put up with this for more than a month, two at the most, without taking proactive steps to change something, is beyond me.

My cousin, a former natural bodybuilder, he and I sometimes talked about fat loss and so on, and I couldn’t even imagine someone like him simply sitting around waiting for months and months for something to change. I realized that this was what it came down to. Bodybuilders wouldn’t. Dieters would. It’s like a different philosophy. As if dieters feel less deserving, or more sadly resigned to some fate of ‘unfair and illogical body situations’ so they just stoically accept this, as if it were the will of God or something. Bodybuilders don’t have that kind of fatalistic crap in their mindset, and they are likely to change their approach weekly based on measurements and evaluating what didn’t work the previous week — two, at the most.

To me, it seemed like there was some inflexibility in the lowcarber world in general, like, “Lowcarb is the answer, and even when it appears the question has changed.” I saw that many people went off lowcarb during long stalls, I’m sure in part because it would be damned demoralizing. But the real issue to me, beyond the lack of flexibility, beyond the rather surreal pollyanic ‘faith’ approach to it all, was the fact that the stalls happened AT ALL. This suggested a larger issue:

The body is marvelously adaptible. Eat fewer calories, it will reduce your metabolism to match. (It will also reduce your thyroid’s T3 output, which also reduces metabolism.) Eat infrequently, it will reduce your metabolism to match. Exercise or be sedentary, it will increase or reduce your metabolism to match. So it struck me to wonder: if you eat lowcarb, will it gradually reduce your metabolism? Will the body “adapt” to lowcarb, just like it adapts to anything else? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed unreasonable to expect that it wouldn’t, given it reacts and adapts to everything else we do.

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2. The number of people who went off lowcarb eventually, and regained weight, seemed to be right in the same 95 percentile as every other ‘diet plan’. Now, I know, sing it with me sistahs, “It’s not a diet, it’s an eating plan for life!” Yeah. I’m sure Weight Watchers people say the same thing. As I like to say, no eating plan works for you if you aren’t on it. The reality is that for nearly everybody with rare exceptions, eating lowcarb can be a real pain in the butt, especially for people who are not used to making time and effort for cooking and planning ahead. Yet it disturbed me to think that it was apparently so difficult that the number of long term lowcarbers would seem to be so low compared to ‘all the others’ who had never returned, or who had returned having gained back the weight and then more.

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3. Another thing that bothered me is that the weight gain was so insanely rapid for people. I mean, although my initial weight gain was fast, it took me 15 years to gain the rest of it. Most people, it takes them quite awhile to get to whatever ‘high point’ they’ve got. The weight gain when someone went off lowcarb was far more rapid than the initial, pre-lowcarb weight gain most folks had put that much on with. This again suggested to me that maybe the body was adapting to lowcarb, just like it does to low-calorie, so that the metabolism adjusted to it and when people changed their approach, the fat would just pile on.

Everything that seemed to be the biggest problems, that I noticed the most when reading tons of lowcarber journals and discussion in bulk, seemed to point to the same likely scenario: the body adapted to lowcarb, and nobody seemed to be doing anything about this, to prevent it or change or even recognize it.

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4. In all the famous lowcarb books, in all the lowcarb “Philosophy,” there is a heaven for good behavior. What I mean is, allegedly once you have lost whatever weight you had to lose on lowcarb, then you would gradually increase your carbs. Atkins has meals with so many carbs I’d need a week to eat them. The Drs. Eades as well. The idea was that once you didn’t want to actively lose weight anymore, you could increase your carbs to anywhere from 55-150 a day, depending on the person. This sounds really good on paper. It sounds logical, like, you reduce carbs real low and lose weight, and then bring them up until you are simply maintaining. It all makes perfect sense, right?

Except in the real world that I see on the lowcarb forums, this almost never happens–at least, not to anybody who has lost a significant amount of weight. (I really don’t take the small losses as an example as they don’t have to lowcarb long enough for that.) First, people often take so insanely long to lose the last 20 lbs that it becomes a lifetime probject. Second, even when people reach their goals, and they are in ‘maintenance’, I read what they say, what they eat daily, what their issues are, and it is almost unanimous: if they spent over six months (or especially over a year) losing their weight on 30 carbs a day, that’s it. If they eat more than around 30 carbs a day, they start gaining weight.

So that promised nirvana of “increasing carbs so you could eat more like normal people, or at least not stress about spices and sauces,” might look good on paper, but it almost never works in real life. The reality seems to be that long-term lowcarbers’ bodies adapt to the carb intake and from that point on, increasing that intake causes weight gain. So in reality, induction was not just a two week thing. It was the way people had to eat almost for life. No wonder most people can’t do it indefinitely. Nobody including Atkins himself ever expected people to live on that indefinitely. But the choice becomes to do so, or to gain back the weight.

Again, it all seemed to come down to: the body adapts. People get fat in part because of that adaptation. They begin losing weight on lowcarb, but eventually, whether during the weight loss or not long after it (maybe depending on how long it takes, how rapid the loss, etc.), the adaptation factor kicks in. (The fact that many lowcarbers not only ate the same general nutrient-counts per day, but often even the same food every day, seemed to me like it would only increase the adaptation tendency.)

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So what are we doing about it? I thought and thought about this. I finally decided that “logically,” if the body’s adapting was the trouble spot, then maybe one needed to vary the number of carbs they ate once in awhile, so the body wouldn’t do that. Has anybody else ever thought of this, I wondered? Surely I can’t be the first person to notice this phenomenon, no matter how utterly silent and oblivious the lowcarb world at large online seems to be!

So I went to google and I typed in “carbohydrate variation” to see what would come up.

Bingo. I got about a million bodybuilding websites and bodybuilder blog posts as a result.

So I went to about a dozen of them that looked interesting, and I read the articles, and I read the message boards. Carbohydrate variation is also known as “carb cycling.” Carb cycling has a variety of approaches and plans for it, each of which have their own name or acronym. In all of them, the message was the same, though:

The body adapts to anything done consistently. Carbohydrates, calories, and fat, if eaten at the same amount consistently, will cause ‘adaptation’ of the body, so it no longer is ‘reacting’ to something like a reduction. If you do things consistently, you have to reduce further and further to get results (by results I mean “change”), until it is unhealthy, and it is reducing metabolism from the start when you do so. Eventually you will be nearly starving and still not losing weight — or even gaining it.

Well I’ve been down THAT road. I ‘adapted’ my body into severe obesity once already. I don’t have any desire to adapt my body to yet-something-else. My poor body has enough issues to overcome without adding yet one more.

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When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. When you first make a “change” in your eating plan, your body “reacts to the change.” Such as: it loses weight, or it gains weight, it loses fat, or it gains muscle, or whatever follows the change you made.

Once you do that thing consistently, though, it is no longer a ‘change’. The body is no longer ‘reacting’. There is a limited amount of time for body ‘reaction’ before it adapts and finds its balance with the new approach.

So, weight loss slows down. Or even stops. Stalls. Metabolism reduces to match whatever you have reduced on the intake-side.

It doesn’t seem like rocket science to me.

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One of the things I discovered when reading extensively about how bodybuilders did “low carb,” is that the Atkins-Eades-etc. version of lowcarb is probably a misnomer. In the larger world, about 70-120 carbs a day is considered lowcarb. 40-70/80 carbs a day is considered VERY lowcarb. So as you might imagine, those of us eating 10-40 carbs a day are “ultra” or “severely” lowcarb on that scale. I hadn’t realized that the average carb intake was hundreds a day — and hence, how “radical” my eating plan was.

I had not before considered that my eating plan was “extreme.” To me, high-carb/low-fat did not work for me, so lowcarb was simply what did. I started thinking more about the overall question of lowcarb.

First, the lowcarb approach done anything but briefly (such as bodybuilders do, to lose water prior to competitions), does seem to build in the assumption that everybody on it, maybe everybody period, has some profound metabolic problem with carbohydrates. Now I always assumed I did, once I discovered lowcarb worked for me; I thought that its working for me was the proof that I did. But it turns out, it works for most people. (Not everybody.) That doesn’t imply a carb metabolism problem; it’s just basic biochemistry. Now sure, getting really fat can really screw up a lot of things with your body and metabolism, you can become much more sensitive to blood sugar spikes, more insulin resistant, and the overabundance of fat itself has all kinds of chemical effects that slow metabolism in more than one way. But still, that does not prove that one has some terrible, incurable carbohydrate metabolic problem.

I began wondering if maybe one reason I was so quick to accept that idea, was simply because I was fat. You see, it is obvious if someone weighs so much it’s obvious they have a metabolic problem; as my brother used to say, “No shit, Sherlock!” But all of this time, I have held the belief that this is something that somewhere between genetics and circumstance, fell out of the sky on me. Wasn’t my fault, my doing, my responsibility. It was a curse, and I lived with it, that’s all. “Anybody else with this kind of metabolism would be the same way.”

Well I got thinking a lot more about this, and doing a lot of soul searching. Eventually, I had to conclude that I have been a bit lazy and a bit too quick to accept an excuse. When I look back on my life, particularly my initial massive weight gain in my early 20’s, what I see is that I did just about every imaginable thing that a person could do to gain weight. I ate once a day. I ate right before bed. I ate carbs due to hunger. I ate insufficient protein. I was incredibly sedentary — busy as hell but all in sit-down things. I was massively stressed out. I was chronically sleep deprived. I was nutritionally deficient. In short, I did every single thing that a person needs to do, to gain weight. Lots of it. Fast. And to reduce metabolism. Fast. And to doom my future metabolism to something pretty dysfunctional. Fast. And it worked.

But if my metabolism is currently less than ideal, it is not because I am helpless to some metabolic disorder. I created my own metabolic disorder. In ignorance, true. Under the influence of a system that keeps telling people to eat less to lose weight, true. But so what. The point is, just because the high-carb/low-fat typical medical approach, which probably works for a few people but fails dismally for me, is not workable for weight loss in my case, and just because severe-lowcarb IS workable for weight loss in my case, doesn’t mean there is nothing in between.

Severe exclusion of any major nutrient-source doesn’t really seem that reasonable when you back off the LC belief system for awhile. Reduction, sure! Even low amounts, sure. But when it reaches the zone that everyone on earth but the few in that clique considers “extreme,” maybe it’s time to take a fresh look at things, without the near-religious bias of “my way is the right way!” woven into it. It may be right, or at least ok, but does that mean it’s the *only* way?

When I further considered the issue of body adaptation, I realized that if you start very low carb, there isn’t far to go. If one is to have any kind of a cycling plan that goes sometimes lower and sometimes higher — by significant enough amounts to matter, mind you — you would have to start at a somewhat higher level, so you were in the middle to begin with.

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Of course, the problem with the ‘near-eternal induction’ level plan that most severely obese people are on, just due to the amount of weight they have to lose, is that it effectively resets what your body is adapted to. To begin with, we probably could have eaten 60 carbs a day, mostly in veggies and some dairy, and “gradually” gone into a mild ketogenic state, and lost body fat instead of body fat + lean mass. Now, however, eat more than 35 carbs a day, and I fall out of ketosis, because my body is used to eating 20-30 carbs a day on average.

So, if I had known all this to begin with, I might have begun the eating plan differently. But I didn’t. Yet, I do not regret the last four months at all.

But now I believe that:

1. I think I have been eating too few calories. I think this is part of what is behind my lean body mass loss. People say, “You have to eat at least 1200 calories!” Could we please, as a whole lowcarb field, get a clue? People who are 300# or more need to eat MORE than that. MUCH more. They take advice just like others do and when the advice says something like that, they buy it. They need more. And this means that, unless you eat a cow and two chickens a day, they are going to need to eat a few more carbs as well, to make it more easily possible. Severely overweight people who are not already over-adapted to severely lowcarb, are going to go ketogenic usually at higher carb counts than thin people anyway, so this shouldn’t be a big deal. If someone still wants to do a hard induction, fine, but it really should be limited to two weeks. I would no longer recommend to people that they ’stay on induction until their weight is lost’. It’s going to take years to lose the weight when you start hundreds of pounds into obesity, staying on induction all that time isn’t even healthy, not only because the body’s going to adapt to that severe lack of carbs–something none of the carb experts ever talk about but I see literally *everywhere* so I consider this a rather fundamental flaw in the presentation of this eating plan–but because the carb count doesn’t allow enough sheer food and different foods (for nutrient variance) (and no, vitamins aren’t a replacement for food except for very brief periods where there is little option).

2. I think I have been eating too seldom. The body does not, cannot, store protein, though it can store most other things. About 3 hours after you have eaten, whatever protein you ingested is gone, digested. The body constantly needs protein. So every time you eat farther apart than three hours, let’s say it is 5 hours between your meals, your body just spent two hours feeding off your lean body mass. Even when you sleep it does this. I believe eating literally every 3 hours, like bodybuilders do, would have a huge benefit to everyone but especially to the severely obese, because it would help them eat as much as they needed to per day (it isn’t easy), and it pretty much kills hunger even when one is not in ketosis, and because in my observation, a lot of severely overweight people have more of a problem with NOT eating enough (and then later, being driven by the body’s starvation response to binge) than eating too often.

3. I think I have been eating too few carbs. I know, the experts say that “zero carb is fine because nobody needs carbohydrates.” I shudder when I see the effect this has on people who really work out hard but are still trying to live on 10-20 carbs a day to do it, because their body adapted to that during their weight loss. I will not argue that on some grander physiological perspective, nobody “needs” carbs “since you can live off your own body.” (People doing weight training should not *want* to live off their own bodies — particularly at the weight training point when the muscle is screaming for nutrients — does it help to break down muscle (or starve it) to feed muscle?!) I only question whether it is necessary. I do not live in a cave, I live in Oklahoma, and trying to be “severely” lowcarb in America is like trying to be Amish in New York. It’s possible, but it’s almost ridiculous how much trouble it is. Can I do it if I must? Certainly. Must I? It is that I’m not sure about. I got the idea that because a severe eating approach worked, that must be what I needed. I think that is a leap to conclusion not supported by any real evidence. It is entirely possible that a more balanced eating plan, which as a side effect would make long-term staying on it and social-integration a whole lot easier, might work just as well for me. Would I lose 100# in four months? No. But I don’t believe more than 1/3 that at the most was actual “fat” (vs. water, glycol and lean mass) anyway, so that really shouldn’t matter, since I don’t want to be losing any more of that if I can help it.

o0o

So after a great deal of thought and evaluation, after considering a variety of other eating plans that involved carb cycling, and even calorie and/or fat cycling as well, after reading several plans that I thought were well thought out (such as ‘burnthefat.com’ — although I am not against dietary fat especially saturated fat like the author is, aside from that I generally think his approach is very well thought out) — I finally decided that, just like my original low carb plan that I made up myself, now, I am going to go on my own eating and fitness plan.

It took a lot of reading, thinking and tweaking before I came up with something. I started with something that was geared to ‘repair metabolism’, with nutrient ratios and so on. It was such a pain in the butt to try and get counts right for with food that I finally threw up my hands and decided to take a different approach entirely. I will post my new eating plan — which I have not begun, though I was supposed to begin last week! — as the next blog post.

As a last note, most of the research there is about lowcarb, is not super long term — I mean, it’s not severely obese people on induction or near-induction level carbs for long periods being looked at. I believe some of the issues I’ve talked about here, like the need for variation in carb intake to prevent body adaptation, simply don’t get run into with the average study. Maybe this is why there isn’t more about it in the common literature. I mean it’s all over health and fitness authors who include moderate to low carb, but I don’t even remember seeing it in the ultra-low carb authors’ books. This isn’t anything new, or novel (at all). It’s just not normally an issue in the lowcarb world, and maybe part of that is because most people are trying to lose 20-60 pounds, not 100++.

The problem with any human endeavor is that, well, humans are the ones running it.

Even in the most admirable pursuits, such as science, this is going to bring human qualities into it — including politics, marketing, commercialism, information control, power struggles, and the tendency of humans to focus on what they already believe in and to resist change.

A recent discussion on a lowcarb forum included a quote so great that I’d like to include it here.

Reflections On Scientific Dogma

by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick
http://www.thincs.org/Malcolm3.htm#oct24
—————–

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute has today decided to award

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2005

jointly to

Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren

for their discovery of

“the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease”

—————–

It was good to see these two winning the Nobel Prize, with the key piece of following text appended.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who with tenacity and a prepared mind challenged prevailing dogmas.

“Who with tenacity and a prepared mind challenged prevailing dogmas….” A few short words. As if the Second World War could be encapsulated thus, “In the Second World War, the Allies defeated Germany, Japan and a few other countries after a series of successful engagements.”

I followed the helicobacter story from pretty early on in the proceedings. At first, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were personally attacked and ritually humiliated for questioning the wisdom of their superiors. When this didn’t have the desired effect, their work was rubbished. Barry Marshal, at one point, was forced to swallow helicobacter pylori himself, then develop ulcers, in order to prove that bacteria could cause ulcers.

As the work of these two became better known, and appeared to be threatening the multi-billion-dollar market in ulcer-healing drugs, the major pharmaceutical companies lined up expert after expert after opinion leader to intensify the attack. It would have been easy to fold under this level of pressure. Good on Marshall and Warren for sticking to their guns.

Their story highlights an issue about science that has bothered me for years. Namely, the incredible, stifling power of dogma. One would hope that scientists have open minds, but the more you study science, and scientific thinking, the more it becomes clear that the minds of most scientists remain firmly, and highly aggressively, shut.

I have tried to train myself to put all ideas into one of three places — probable, possible or unlikely — and never to allow myself to become emotionally attached to any hypothesis. But most scientists, especially medical scientists, seem only to have two places to store their thoughts. They are true or false; right or wrong; sensible or stupid. This is usually supported by the killer scientific argument, “Do you know who I am, young man?” This is knows as Eminence-Based Medicine.

… If I had just one wish, it would be this: that all scientists took the following oath. “I shall always support and encourage new ideas, no matter how superficially idiotic and wrong they may seem. I shall also remember that established and comfortable ideas may well be wrong, and should be attacked and criticized at all times.”

The chances of this happening are, officially, fat.

PS: A raised cholesterol level causes heart disease. Ho, ho, ho.

People often ask why others question science; or ask, “Isn’t trusting some of the research that supports lowcarb vs. research that doesn’t seem to, cherry-picking what you want to believe?”

Concerning skepticism about science, for which I have great respect as a process, I think the above essay is an excellent rejoinder.

For the rest of modern science, I can only say: show me the money. Show me the funder; show me the scientist; and for godssakes, show me the real paper, not just the media presentation, the media gets more wrong or misrepresented in its 5th-grade-level sound-bites than it ever gets right.

And importantly: show me the conditions of that research. Who can forget Dr. Richard Atkins publishing about how more than 30 carbs a day “would not work” to put someone in his “induction” process, and then seeing research done with 55-100+ carbs per day, that did not get the same result obviously, billed as allegedly having “disproved” his findings about his lowcarb eating plan bringing certain body results? Even though technically it only confirmed what he’d already said but on a different facet of the topic? The devil is in the details, as the saying goes, sometimes a bit literally.

Concerning the results of “truth” about lowcarb, I say: show me the weight loss, the blood count improvements, the removal of all kinds of minor medical symptoms, and the great improvement in overall health and quality of life.

I don’t have to look farther than my scale or mirror and my own life — or that of so many other lowcarbers I know — to see the reality when the rubber hits the road on this question. Lowcarb rocks. Maybe other eating plans work for other people. But lowcarb is saving my life — and improving my health, mental and physical — one day at a time. I’ll leave the science to the scientists. For me, what counts is what works.

Over on the LowCarber.Org forum, there was a thread based on a linked article about the 10 reasons that lowcarb is allegedly bad, wrong, a problem, etc. (The original link is here.)

Well! There are just SO MANY things to worry about when you’re lowcarbing that coming up with a list of only 10 reasons of my own was tough, but I managed it.

So this is my own list of 10 best reasons why a low carb diet can be downright dangerous to the uninformed. BEWARE!

10. If I eat low-fat/high-carb and stay fat, I can insist those around me be my servants (due to my obese helplessness) the rest of my natural life. Low carb has already dropped 85 pounds off me in 3 months. Not only do I not require someone else do my shopping now, I actually FEEL like doing it myself. Low-carb has already deprived me of some of my life of ease. They never warned me about this.

9. Thanks to lowcarb wiping out my acid reflux, I no longer am forced to sleep sitting up, and no longer wake up several times a night, staying up for hours. Do you have any idea how much email I’m not getting done that I used to? I know my dear family misses terribly my 3am tomes about the most miniscule details of my thoughts about my life. This is sure to cause a great rift between us any minute now. The bonds of family are precious, and low carb is ruining it for me by letting me sleep blissfully through the night! Just one more nasty side effect those lowcarbers never warn you about.

8. Now that I eat lots of protein, avoid starches and carby stuff it turns out I’m mildly sensitive to, and I stay in benign dietary ketosis all the time (”BDK” for short, or, “It isn’t diabetic ketoacidosis you moron” for long), I find my desire to eat useless junkfoods that I loved but helped me weigh nearly 500lbs has gone away. No more am I gasping like a heroin addict getting a fix with the milk carton at 2am. No longer am I eating enough carbs in pasta to overdose a marathoner and still knock me out from the blood sugar drop a short time later. But do we not call on God to help us fight such trials? Lowcarb has already come between me and my Divine Pleading by making it easy for me to eat healthy food all on my own. Lowcarbers hide the spiritual risks or nobody would dare try this. We’re talkin’ about the fate of your SOUL, man.

7. Recently I discovered that having mental clarity all day during my job went a long way toward hearing and understanding what everybody around me was saying — and sometimes, not saying. Did anybody ask me if I REALLY wanted to know that kind of information? Did it not occur to anybody that “ignorance is bliss,” and that being a space cadet has been proven to lower job stress? Sure, I’ll lose weight and be healthier but what if I die of the added stress that “comprehension” of what my boss wants has forced on me? Yes, it’s these kind of insidious little things that those fad lowcarbers will never tell the newbies.

6. Last week I was traveling, and as I noted in my blog, a young cabbie spent half my taxi ride making eyes at me and suggesting he liked “big women.” Had I not felt friendly and energetic and, may I add, had lowcarb not restored my complexion to its former healthy glow, I seriously doubt I would have been faced with this kind of ten-minute-temptation. Do people really understand what kind of danger to a married woman lowcarbing could be? There may come a day when people actually look at me without sneering, looking away, or bursting into uncontrollable laughter. This could definitely loosen my morals in a matter of minutes just from the novelty of it, frankly. And do you suppose this constant challenge to Moral Integrity is ever mentioned by lowcarbers? Nooooo. You’d think people ALWAYS looked and felt better and it was no issue at all. Well I disagree. People considering lowcarb should be warned of this potential!

5. Now that I have more energy, my child is getting to bed on time more often, and my husband is actually having to answer to having a relationship with me. Neither of them are particularly happy about this. I find the better I feel about myself, the more I actually expect other people to treat me decently. This kind of imbalanced lack of subservience on my part is causing all kinds of ripples in my life. Family strife! Social dissent! Lowcarb actually reminded me I was worth something and had the right to make my life what I want it to be. I’m sure my more dysfunctional family members would like to ‘deprogram’ me from this lowcarb cult so they could live comfortably with me being appropriately yet quietly miserable. Yet another wide-reaching side effect that few people ever mention when discussing carb counts.

4. Since going on lowcarb, I actually wake up in the morning. I don’t feel like I am 20,000 leagues under the sea anymore. I am even capable of getting up and functioning without a major injection of some kind of drug like caffeine. The water drop and weight loss has made me more limber, and I move around a lot less like Frankenstein or Egor than I used to. My shift into being a bit more of a morning person has grossly offended my family, my coworkers, and all eight (!) of my cats. Do other eating plans cause this kind of interpersonal contention? I think not. Lowcarb ought to come with a warning label.

3. Now that I eat lowcarb, I’m ingesting more vegetables than I ever have in my life. I’ve begun depending a lot on my garden for fresh vegetables and strawberries and scallions on demand. Thanks to low carb, Walmart is making that much less money off my shopping every week. Does nobody even care about the impact that more financial self-sufficiency and healthier food might have if everyone ate like that? How many jobs could be lost just because of millions of backyard chili peppers? Our country’s economy depends on us to buy Mac & Cheese, McDonald’s and deep-fried Fish & Chips! (Not to mention our medical industry’s financial well-being.) Lowcarb must be downright un-patriotic.

2. With all my new energy and enthusiasm, I have begun to think about sex a LOT more. A lot. More. Do I really need to elaborate here. Baby you just have NO idea. Nobody ever warned me that eating steak and eggs instead of fruit loops would turn me into a brazen hussy. (Maybe it was really The Forbidden Steak all along. Which would explain complaints that the opposite sex is perceived as meat.) Did I mention… a LOT more? Hmmmn. Maybe I should have made this reason #1.

1. Assuming I continue this questionably-sane eating plan known as lowcarb, there’s a very real possibility that, just as my doctor warned me, down the road, I might actually live to see my little girl grow up. I might not keel over dead before she’s 12. I might not even develop any major diseases. I might, while we’re on that subject, actually live long enough to have her bad mouthing me as a teen — or, heaven forbid, pawning her squalling little babies off on me someday. That’s a whole lot of life and stress between then and now that I’m probably going to have to put up with, since DYING becomes so much less an option, short of swan-diving into traffic, the longer I low carb.

Let this list serve as a warning to all.

Lucyyyyyy! I’m home!

OK, Colorado was really cool, my host was super nice, and while I regret that I had to spend most of it working rather than vacationing, still I’m glad I got away for awhile. Whew! A break from Mundania… and now I have returned.

I hadn’t lost much weight for the two weeks prior, despite having low carbs and low cal, but I admit, that (a) I had not been drinking anywhere near enough water, and (b) I’d developed this habit of lowcarb slimfast (LCSF).

While gone (19 days including days travel), I was very ill for a couple days; I had one high-carb day at thanksgiving (I had a great New York strip steak at an awesome restaurant in Glenwood Springs Colorado called “Rivers” — truly divine! — but I ate the sides AND a dessert, so…!), but otherwise had very little to eat. I did eat breakfast several times. The rest of the time I mostly didn’t eat or had a LCSF if anything.

My host seemed a little surprised. Most people really don’t believe me when I say I don’t eat much. One of my best friends, whom I love dearly, a Weight Watchers advocate who is working her ass off on the last 20-30 lbs of her own challenge, assures me that if only I keep a food diary, I will see how much I am actually eating throughout a day, that yes oh yes, all those little snacks will add up. I couldn’t keep from cracking up over that, but I didn’t bother disillusioning her.

I don’t snack — lowcarbers, unlike low-calorie folks, are not chronically starving (with some rare exceptions I have heard of) — usually they’re so full of protein you have to force food down their throats. But even aside from that, I just don’t eat much, and can easily go a whole day without eating and not notice until late at night (as that was my eating habit for years: no food, then carbfest late at night before bed). Still, once someone knows you weigh that much, no matter how big a believer in metabolism and insulin issues and so on they may be, there is no way they are going to believe that you don’t eat like a pig in heat.

Anyway. Since I couldn’t FIT in the train bathrooms, I avoided eating the day before the train and most (not all) of the time on it. The day before I left, more than a little hacked about not being able to eat for such a stupid reason (not eating doesn’t bother me, but not being ABLE to is another story! haha!) I ate like 4 candies in obvious defiance. (Nothing else that day.) Surprisingly it didn’t seem to toss my K since I didn’t feel any cravings or hunger the next day. I ate a couple carby meals (after not eating all day) right after getting home, but am now on the straight and narrow Lord, yay-uh!

o0o

I’d like to talk about my last 5 weeks of very slow weight loss.

Now I know some degree of this is normal. One of my bestest (if rarest) friend-creatures is Don W., a man who used to be a personal trainer. He has taken people from the 400’s down to ‘normal’ weights — one woman was so inspired by the journey she opened a gym. He warned me that you gotta lose it FAST because the body starts getting a clue and tries to protect you by putting on the brakes and after that point, it’s actual WORK.

But.

I mentioned previously how the lowcarb slimfast gave me that slightly ‘addictive’ response the way I get with milk. Nowhere near as strong, of course. Milk leads to more, and more, until I’m up at 3am drinking out of the carton, gasping with my back against the closed refrigerator door like a heroin addict finally getting a fix.

I was reading yesterday on the net, one doc who said in his opinion, ALL “addiction reactions” to food are a sign of food allergies. This seems reasonable to me, because honestly, addiction to any food does NOT seem reasonable. I mean, many people like beets or asparagus, but do you ever hear of people getting addicted to beets or asparagus? Having trouble eating too much of them? Not real often, haha! For that matter, you don’t hear much of that with steaks or pork chops, either.

Most the foods that addict people are high-carb/high-sugar (sugar being addictive), dairy, and grain products. Some researchers now say that a ridiculous % of the population is suspected to be “mildly sensitive to” grains — not enough to actually have celiac but apparently it’s enough to have amped the incidence of bizarre medical disorders like PCOS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and other things into the stratosphere.

And obesity. Because the degree of allergic response that causes the addictive response not only pulls more and more of it into the body, but the partly digested allergens create a variety of health problems, some of which directly impact fat to energy processing and metabolism. I should have gotten references on all this stuff I was reading but I was plowing through a lot of stuff just making my own neural connections.

I am not lactose intolerant — but it seems highly likely I have some kind of response to the protein of Caseine, and that’s why milk is very literally a drug to me, to the degree that at a couple points in my life (ironically, not when fat), I could drink a gallon a DAY — unless I get TOTALLY AWAY from it and refuse to drink it at ALL. I don’t have any issues with dairy. Although ice cream can make me crave milk. But generally, dairy products and dairy “in” things doesn’t bother me — only when it’s a straight shot of caseine-heavy product. If I’m lowcarb and I have even one gulp of milk, I’ll have cravings for milk and sugar and carbs all day. I know better.

OK so finally getting to the point here.

I was thinking about my stupid, instant growing-dependence on Low Carb Slim Fast as a whole food group unto itself. Sure, it plays into my existing, primary problem: that I don’t eat, don’t want to deal with the time or trouble, so it’s a great excuse to skip a meal and suck down a can in 20 seconds — that alone might be good cause to avoid the stuff. But still, I have a general pace of weight loss going, with or without “enough hydration” per day, and when I shifted to more of the LCSF, it dropped.

I got to thinking about this. I looked at the ingredients on it the first ingredient on the list after water is Caseine. That is the main protein source, so there is a heavy dose of it.

Caseine. The difference in quantity of caseine in cow vs. human milk is allegedly one reason why humans gain a certain amount of weight after birth and cows gain a LOT more a LOT faster.

So…. let me see if I have this straight. A protein which is (a) addictive to apparently a good chunk of our population, and (b) which is known to be highly correlated to weight gain, is the primary ingredient in (c) a weight loss product.

What part of this picture isn’t clear yet?

I’m afraid I’m going to have to toss out the slimfast and go back to eating normal foods again. Sigh. It’s a lot more trouble. And the LCSF is yummy. But… I’m not losing weight on it really and I don’t think that’s coincidence or only the other factors.

So today I fried up about 8oz of spicy breakfast sausage; 4 eggs scrambled with red pepper flakes, oregano and some natures’ seasoning and hot chili sauce; chopped all that up and mixed it and dumped it in a storage bowl. Grated a bunch of colbyjack cheese and put it in a ziplock. Dug out the lowcarb tortillas. So, when I must eat and be quick about it, I can briefly nuke a bit of egg/sausage on a paper plate, heat the tortilla, dump some cheese and the hot stuff in, roll it up and put it on that plate and leave the kitchen with an edible protein burrito/taco. Granted, the tortilla is some carbs plus some “fiber deductible carbs” — those count, in my eating plan, not as carbs but still as something I must limit per day — but it didn’t take long to make and that should give me several meals.

I’m going to make what my host did while I was out there and if it comes out half as well as hers, I’ll post it as one of my fave recipes here on the blog. Have to try it myself before I can post it here.

Also speaking of milkish products… I must try the lowcarb eggnog. :-)

One GOOD thing: around a month ago I lost all interest in food. It was terrible in a way. No more experimenting because I didn’t care. I was NEVER hungry, and food was just totally off my radar. I seem to be real slowly coming out of that. I’m starting to regain some interest in it. So I hope to get back to some decent experimenting again now that I’m home!

I know that I have been away from my blog for longer than ever. Sorry about that.

First, my life was sucked into that pit of despair called “no time for mom.” Some of you must already know this song. You get up at about 6:30am to start getting kid ready for school and animals fed and yourself dressed and so on. As soon as the kid is at school you come home and go to work. As soon as you’re off work, you’re busy doing errands, things for the kid’s extra activities, etc. As soon as that is done, you realize it’s now nighttime and you forgot to eat all day.

Or, you didn’t forget, you just didn’t get a chance. And since unlike high-carb eating, it isn’t quite so easy to “grab something quickly,” you can bemoan not eating all day, but if you’re busy and you can’t leave work, that’s just the way it is.

Not-eating regularly tends to make me gain weight. I realize many people can’t grasp this because they think weight is all about calories. I am here to tell you, my body is apparently a survivor. Down through millennia, my ancestors must have survived the long winters and the ravages of illness by storing more fat faster than anybody else. Low carb eating has helped me realize that I lose far more weight eating a bunch of food several times a day, than eating almost no food, but a carby meal once a day.

But eating “several times a day” is easier said than done, isn’t it? That means that at some point, you had to get off your butt and PREPARE that food. Even if it was some cheese sticks, a garlic clove and green onions (one of my favorite snacks, which I haven’t had in a long time. Yum! I think I’ll have it tomorrow!), still there is at least a minimum of “pre-effort” required.

Let me backtrack to not long after I last posted. First, I gained ten pounds. IN A DAY. Now since this is physiologically impossible to do via fat or muscle cells, I figured it had to be water, and wondered if it was time for ‘that time of the month’, or TOM as some call it online. Mine has always been so irregular it tends to surprise me. Yep, the very next day, TOM arrived. And I lost 9 of the pounds. Of course the next day I gained four. And the next day I lost those. At that point I decided I was an idiot to weigh myself during the menses and I would have to wait until it was over.

TOM was more intense than any I’ve had since I was a teenager. I could hardly move off the quadrupled towel and TWO tom-utilities. To example how bleeding that heavily can make a hormonal woman completely deluded, I actually uttered to my friend that on the bright side, thanks to all the blood loss I bet I’d be at least a pound lighter.

Now that is optimism.

Today I am five pounds lighter than I was when I began it, though it seems TOM slowed the ‘momentum’ I had going for the weight loss.

Don’t let me lie. I haven’t been drinking nearly enough water and I know that matters. So it’s my own fault if it’s slowed down.

Meanwhile, back at the underfed home office, desperation about my lack of available time to “deal with” having food available kicked in.

First it was the puddings. Any chocolate pudding that tastes decent (only when very cold) and has 20g protein, 100cal and 2 carbs (1 fiber) is my friend, so as I’ve mentioned before, Instone Pudding is my lowcarb hero.

It’s a frankenfood, to some degree. Sure, no real reason why a pudding has to be moreso than a bake mix I realize, but something about the fact that it tastes good and comes in a pop-top can makes it seem inherently sinful in some way. As if it can’t possibly be good for me if I *like* it.

But even I don’t like it enough to eat it every day, let alone more than once a day. The novelty wore off and although I like them, I have not had one in probably a week.

Then, I talked DH into making me a ton more of the “heavy on the meat chili verde”. Although this batch was not quite as good as the one prior, it was still very yummy. I ate that in the little 1/2 cup Glad plastic storage bowls for literally a week, several times a day. It took that long to get rid of it, worrying it would go bad if I didn’t eat it. Since only a few days before I had ended an 18-meals-in-a-row sized dose of the stuff, suffice to say that now, I think I am ready to not eat it for awhile. Possibly a long while.

But wait, it got better. My SLIM FAST LOW CARB order arrived! That’s right, in pop-top cans, chocolate and vanilla, seriously overpriced online, slimfast has a ‘lowcarb’ option. I bought a couple boxes (4 per box) each to try them out. I had the following conclusions.

1. I detest the chocolate. I’m normally the chocoholic. My 10 year old likes it though. So now when she wants to go eat carby snacks I tell her to drink a slimfast. It’s 180 calories, 2 net carbs, 20 grams protein, and a bunch of vitamins.

2. If they are not cold, and I mean REALLY cold, even the vanilla is kinda yucky. But I turned my little room-fridge I got just for lowcarb stuff up a bit, so it’s on the verge of nearly freezing, and now I really love the vanilla. I suppose with the cold all I can taste is the “creamy sweet” of it.

Alas, this has resulted in me making slimfast my primary food group. I feel rightfully guilty about this. Slimfast is NOT A FOOD. And to add injury to insult to my poor sweet body-spirit, because SF is a liquid, (a) I’m drinking it instead of water and (b) I don’t have solid food making me thirsty for water. So I’ve drank vastly less water lately. I have, however, managed to plow through quite a few slimfasts.

They are not cheap. 24 cans cost me $39 plus $8 shipping. So, sucking down 3-4 a day of these things could add up.

And so I’ve felt guilty. I had no time to write, but I also felt like a tree sloth, a beer slug, a burnt-toast kinda gal, because here I am all enthusiastic about lowcarb and so on, but I can’t seem to make even an hour or even half an hour to prepare some cheese sticks or rollups or something. (It just occurred to me that a variety of meats and cheeses rolled up in a LC tortilla and sliced in medallions, with a little mustard on the top of each, would be a yummy snack. Yay! Tomorrow is sounding better already!)

Oh yeah! And DID I MENTION the ultimate “you should make better choices” lowcarb snack: pepperoni nuked with mozzarella cheese and some oregano and red pepper flakes on top. I had that a couple times. Felt so guilty… between all the carcinogens probably in pepperoni, the “interesting” digestive results that a massive dose of it gives me, and the fact that it’s ingesting enough calories for an entire day in one paper-plate sized pizza-toppings meal… well it is not ideal. But, if you really need protein and calories and you don’t have much time, it works.

So that’s about it. Time is such a problem for me sometimes… and I’ve felt guilty about the fact that although I have maintained low carb, and generally made my protein and calories each day, still I feel as if I’m not doing things as completely and well as I should be. I feel I’d be losing weight a little faster if I were.

My scale varies by about 5lbs depending on whether I am leaning ever so slightly on the front of my feet vs. the back, so I have begun measuring always the front. I am still keeping my spreadsheet. I haven’t been recording my food, but I can sum it up: “a combination of 4-6 elements per day, which are either 1/2 cup servings of chili verde or cans of slimfast.”

I need to do lowcarb penance, except my literal “penance” stage of lowcarbing is keeping carbs just as low as I have been keeping them, more by accident than design.

Tomorrow, I ASPIRE, damn it. The cold snap happened and we have two grocery sacks stuffed with beautiful fresh garden peppers. I want to eat as many as I can before they go bad. (We usually give a bunch to the guys at the local mexican food restaurant, as they are some of the few in our area that really seem to like HOT food as much as we do!) I want to have scrambled eggs… and peppers. I’d like to have tuna and mayo and green onions and some miracle-mayo in a lowcarb tortilla… with peppers. (No, I’ve never tried that, I just thought of it, but it seems possible.) I want to have some cheese just melted over slices of peppers. I can probably carb myself out on peppers if I’m not careful. (Especially since I have a daily cap on how many ‘deductible’ carbs I can have, as well as carbs themselves.) We can have a big chicken stirfry with tons of peppers. OK! I have SO cheered myself back up now!

I was feeling all pouty about myself but I feel better now. Tomorrow is another day! The first day of the rest of my life. I can do better!

(Reminder to self: LC SLIM FAST IS NOT FOOD!)

I’m a metaphysical kinda gal, and one of the things I find interesting is the concept of nature’s sentience, and what you might consider the ‘devas’ (architects) and ’spirits’ (sort of like nature-angels) of nature itself.

This is not ‘instead of’ a belief in God, but rather, part and parcel of it; I tend to think that all things are by nature (without distortion) divine, because all things are of God. I consider animals, plants and even metals and rock (in different ways) to be “composed of sentience” because I think our entire reality/universe is.

Physicists say that mass, like your coffee table, is ‘vibrating energy trapped in a cohesive shape.’ That we see it as a coffee table and not vibrating energy is due to the biological filters of our body. That it hurts when we run into it is due to the span of frequencies our biological bodies inhabit “compared to” that of the coffee table. If it vibrated more quickly than our bodys’-energy, it would be less-solid than us, from slightly permeable to liquid to gas to sound to light and finally to invisible. It is vibrating somewhat more slowly, which is why it is seemingly denser and harder than we are. If it were yet more dense, it would eventually be hard as rock, then diamond, and if it were too slow, it might not even be “within the range” of frequency we can perceive, and like light above the violet zone, we might be oblivious to it.

I consider ‘energy’ to be the other side (wave form) of consciousness, in the same way that space and time are the same thing but in an inexplicable way none of us will ever get our brains around while resident in these bodies. Hence, the coffee table ‘has’ some degree of consciousness, though it is not ’self-aware’ in the way that humans are. And I tend to assume that there are identities in our universe which are ‘aware’ to a degree that makes us look about as bright as coffee tables. ;-) Angels maybe, who knows.

So lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my body having its OWN consciousness, as apart from, although part-of, “mine.” I’ve had some “esoteric experiences” where I became incredibly aware of this, and it was totally amazing.

We think of our bodies “as” “us”. Yet whether your religion is something traditional or more metaphysical, all of them definitely hold the philsophy that “we are more than our physical bodies” — that bodies are something we HAVE, not something we ARE.

The past few days I have been forcing myself to think of my body not AS me but as a highly intelligent, complex “nature spirit” that happens to be “part of” me.

And what’s kinda funny is that it is really having an effect. I am starting to think of my body as a friend — as a sweet creature that I want to TAKE CARE OF. Not like, “I’m ignoring you because you’re me and who cares about me.” More like a partnership of sorts, though not as separated as that makes it sound.

I’m starting to think when I ignore that I am thirsty, or have to pee but I’m busy and try to put it off, or when my back hurts because I’m slouching and I’m ignoring it, that I am being very unkind to this fabulous entity, thanks to whom I have a presence in this range of frequency and beat-pattern we call reality. :-)

I’m starting to think that maybe I should be nicer to my body. It has put up with a whole lot of crap over the years and the fact is, it was my horrible lifestyle that apparently destroyed my metabolism, and that was MY choice, not my body’s. Aside from the metabolic issues, I’m really disgustingly healthy. I’ve been athletic and strong all my life until my massive weight gain around 15 years ago. I’ve always carried weight far better than most people, looking thinner with more weight and being more active at higher weights, who knows why, distribution of it maybe. I was blessed with the ability to really focus, absorb, extrapolate and innovate, mental qualities that have benefitted my life in every area. Though I’m sure higher aspects of “ME” have something to do with that stuff too, the bottom line is that my body, as an entity worth respecting on its own merits, has worked hard for me, suffered a lot, and continues to support me like a real trooper despite the condition I’ve put it in.

I’m concluding that maybe there is some “lack of self-value” going on, if I ignore my body when I think of it as “me,” yet am suddenly all compassion and appreciation when I think of it as even partly separable. Maybe that Virgo service ethic gone overboard: “Everybody else matters more than me.”

I’m starting to think of my body more as a gift from God I’ve been given for my use, rather than an obnoxious incomprehensible thing I am trapped in.

Anyway, this is just musing a bit, but it’s the kind of thing I find interesting. And the good news is, my body is benefitting, and as a result, so is my life.

I’m a closet sociologist, I joke; 20 years of self-education, not formal schooling, but I consider the subject fascinating. I am normally involved with some rather ‘alternative’ topics, which by coincidence is a nice place to study a whole lot of alternative psychology, haha. I’m also very interested in internet communications and psychology, so online “fields” as I call them — a general sphere of collected websites, forums, blogs, tools and shops that cater to some niche interest — are always an fun exploration.

Lowcarbing has its own “niche field.” It’s a fairly small one, actually. There are several large forums, although the larger the forum, the more it is mixed with people doing every imaginable kind of diet including things completely different than lowcarb. I admit, that when I am journaling or reading journals about lowcarb, I feel sort of nonplussed about someone who is instead on weight watchers lowfat/ lowcal/ highcarb eating plan, or something else also very different than mine. I don’t mind what people choose — my best friend loves WW and I love her, so for now, I’m happy for her — but it seems like it’s pretty difficult to give any kind of useful advice to someone besides “Ra Ra” cheerleading, when the way people go about losing the weight is so drastically different.

I read all the lowcarb blogs I can find, and I have 15-20 journals at the LowCarber forum bookmarked to visit daily. Still, it isn’t much new stuff to read for a person who reads fast and types fast and is used to high-volume internet activity. It’s relatively educational, in a personality profile sense, though.

People who’ve lost a lot of weight quickly, seem to be the most fervent about the details of their beliefs about food. People who’ve lost a lot of weight but very slowly seem a lot more relaxed about it; of course, maybe being more relaxed is why they lost it more slowly — or maybe being forced to develop patience, and to work on the variable details of their body, has made them realize it’s a unique journey. People who are brand new to the subject tend to be much more insecure both in the eating plan and themselves but that’s no surprise.

People who’ve been involved for a few months and lost some weight but probably not as much as they hoped, have more of a tendency to be outright rude to others, especially new folks, and I expect there is some of that “preaching it to make themselves better believe what they’re doing is right” going on, which you can see in most religions never mind most eating plans. (Note: I’m not against religion. But sometimes genuine love and devotion vs. evangelism aren’t well connected, as anybody who’s spent time in church oughtta be able to see for themselves.)

I notice that thin diabetics, who eat lowcarb for that reason and not for weight, often don’t seem nearly as supportive of or even friendly to the really obese as those who themselves are obese, and I figure some of the cultural bias (”I’m LC because I’m ill, but you’re just a pig!”) might be in there somewhere.

People who have been educated in anything health-related, even if the tradition is something like personal training (bodybuilding) which has always been more lowcarb focused than the mainstream, are often like anybody else I guess: they are certain they know it all, which is only a problem when several of them are in the same conversation (as they’re totally convincing when in agreement or on a thread alone).

It doesn’t matter what the argument is. The value vs. negative of dietary fat? Of calories? Of fiber carbs? Of sugar alcohol carbs? Of aerobic exercise? If this weren’t low carb I’d say, “Bring popcorn and sit back and watch the show.” Watching the debates can be an interest all its own.

The people who’ve been lowcarbing for a long time seem the most mellow yet no nonsense about it, for obvious reasons I guess. People new to it, tend to make it almost an obsession, but you see that in every field. And to some degree, when you’re new and you really have to pay attention and spend time learning and such, it’s almost needed.

I notice that thin diabetics, who eat lowcarb for that reason and not for weight, often don’t seem nearly as supportive of or even friendly to the really obese as those who themselves are obese, and I figure some of the cultural bias (”I’m LC because I’m ill, but you’re just a pig!”) might be in there somewhere. This despite the fact that in my view, it’d be hard to find ANY severely obese person who did not have a specific insulin-related metabolic issue — just like they do, although sometimes self-created in ignorance or by parents, and less recognized as a ‘disease’.

I don’t like thinking of metabolic problems as a disease, as that makes it sound hopeless, but they at least qualify as a ’syndrome’ that exists regardless of your eating habits (though low-carb may help improve the situation). They definitely exist as something that you may have to behave in conformity to for the rest of your life, even if you lose the extra weight that made the problems ‘apparent’.

The diversity of opinion even within the lowcarb field itself must be so confusing for new folks. On one hand people will tell you things like, “You must eat enough calories” (usually your baseline metabolic minimum) “or your body will go into starvation mode,” and I am a living breathing example of a body that does exactly that. Some will say, “You must eat several small meals, rather than one bigger meal, to keep your system digesting, because fasting causes the starvation response,” while somewhere else, people are saying that fasting and eating only one meal a day is a really great thing they recommend.

You’ll get lectures on how fat actually helps take OFF weight and hence some oils each day are good, “find some way to incorporate them into your diet,” while others go on about how you should minimize fat, something easier said than done on a lowcarb diet, since most protein has fat (and you will not find anything low-fat going into MY mouth; usually that stuff is in my opinion better considered a frankenfood).

This reminds me of my stepmother, who is diabetic, and who basically is supposed to avoid much calories, fat, cholesterol… interesting, since I’ve done a great deal of reading suggesting that the fat (and even cholesterol) with sufficient protein and low carb will take care of a lot of blood issues, not to mention butt-size issues, and greatly improve a lot of insulin issues as well.

Typical of course, modern medicine prescribes pretty much everything that will not only eventually kill her, definitely not save her, but will ensure she is appropriately miserable in the meantime. It is pretty damn difficult for people to do a diet that restricts nearly everything! (As I say, no eating plan helps if you’re not on it. It needs to be possible, sheesh.)

There are an astonishing number of people with eating disorder problems in the LC field. I suppose there are just as many in WW and other eating plans, but perhaps because I’ve never known anybody with that condition, it always seems surprising to me. In particular the binging and getting fatter (as opposed to the binging and purging — they are probably in WW instead, hahaha).

I gained over 200 lbs in less than 2 years in my mid-20’s. During that, I worked 70 hrs/wk, commuted 4.5 hrs/day on the worst highways, and went to night school. I was stressed out and sleep deprived. I ate one meal a day: Del Taco at 1-2am, before crashing into bed to get up at 6am. Bad lifestyle? Wrong eating? Yep. “Gluttony”? No. “Lazy”? No. Gimme a break!

But this leads to the one thing that I see described, mourned, and opined everywhere, and that gradually has started to really kind of bother me. Not that I mind someone describing their experience — at all. If Jane’s experience was that she binged on massive junkfood and four McD’s meals all the way to 350 lbs, well, that’s Jane’s experience, and it’s good that she shares it, and supports others in doing so.

But I call this the “bon-bon theory” and to me it is one of the most pervasive prejudices against the severely obese. It is essentially the paradigm that says if a person is massively overweight, that it’s obvious they got that way from sitting around eating like a massive glutton all the time… as opposed to some genuine metabolic problem which, if anybody else had it, might have had the very same end result. It is rather irksome. 382 extra pounds of bon-bons! Yeah… riiiight.

I think it’s one of those things that side effects get confused about:

1. Gluttony will make you fat.
2. Serious insulin resistance will make you fat. The more serious, the more fat.
3. Untreated repeatedly abused food sensitivies can contribute greatly as well.
4. Stress contributes hugely.
5. Eating carbs before bed reduces growth hormone in sleep, that contributes.
6. Sleep deprivation contributes.
7. Insert about 40 other factors that contribute to weight gain here.

I gained over 200 lbs in less than 2 years in my mid-20’s. During that time, I worked 70 hours a week, I commuted 4.5 hours a day on the worst highways in the nation, and I went to night school. I was massively stressed out, and seriously sleep deprived.

I ate one meal a day, not a huge one but more than a small one for sure: Del Taco (pure carbs!), just before I crashed into sleep at 1-2am, to get up the next day by 6am.

I did not know that a massive dose of carbs whacked your insulin levels, or that combining this constantly with growing overweight to obesity would create an insulin resistance issue. Much of my family deals with what to me is obviously IR, but they are oblivious… after 40 years of dieting for some of them, it’s second nature to assume they are obviously lazy pigs.

Binging is an eating disorder. Not all severely obese people have an eating disorder, though most of them clearly have a metabolic disorder even if it is combined with an eating problem in some (not all) cases.

I hear people online talk about how they successfully lost weight, but how they gained it to begin with because they used to just totally binge on massive junk, and then felt bad, and then did it again, and kept growing, and so on. This is an eating disorder. I don’t know why that should be considered normal. I don’t even understand this really. Sure, I’ve eaten dessert I shouldn’t have at a restaurant, or too many slices of pizza, or even ‘whatever I wanted’ when I felt my weight was increasing and hopeless to control, but my problem is usually eating at ALL.

After 15+ years of living on one meal late in the day for the most part, getting myself to eat several small meals during the day is hard as hell. It’s a pain. It takes time. It takes planning. And frankly, since I have *trained my body not be hungry until evening*, it also takes eating when I am not particularly hungry, no matter what fire and brimstone people preach against doing that. When I’m around others (even very thin people), they usually end up commenting: how can you get up early, stay up late, and eat and drink like nothing?! I’m very focused. If I’m busy, I don’t even think about food until nighttime, or unless someone drops it in front of me.

At times in the last 15 years, I have tracked my calories, and even “matched food intake with” someone I was living with. I steadily, though much more slowly than that initial period, gained weight — even when they lost it on the same food. And my basal metabolic rate is incredibly high due to my high weight, so you know, it seems physiologically impossible that if you’re only eating like 1500 calories a day or less, that you would not be dropping weight at the speed of light. I’m here to tell ya, if I eat it in carbs, I am gaining weight. And since I’m a total carb addict — whole milk and anything breadlike — it was easy to do that. I didn’t know I had a problem with those foods. I didn’t know lowcarb was the answer. All I knew was that allegedly calories were the factor, and no amount of vastly lower calories than my BMR did not make me lose weight. At all.

I don’t lose weight unless I lowcarb. Period. And even then — the eating many small meals, vs. a few or even one bigger meal, seems to clearly make a difference. So, I can only conclude that for me, carbs are the culprit AND, a seriously overactive body ’survival starvation instinct’ is as well. Even now, losing weight on lowcarb, I don’t lose quite as much as the “calorie math” would suggest. I’m frankly getting pretty sick of the whole calorie-obsession in our culture; I recognize its reality in most cases, but it clearly is not the main criteria for metabolic problems.

Off the subject: I wonder if childbirth and infanthood issues could affect the body in some way. I wonder because I notice with cats, if they are malnourished as young kittens, they are completely distorted for food the rest of their lives — they will happily eat popcorn and spaghetti if you let them because they’ll eat anything. It just seems that some innate-response of the body to food is a bit distorted. Makes me wonder what infanthood issues may ’set up’ for the body as ’survival instincts’.

When I hear somebody on a forum opining that everybody should quit whining about metabolism because the fact is if they weren’t total binging gluttons they wouldn’t be fat, I just sigh. (And on occasion, nobody else has permission to be fat; a person will be happy to diss others for being so since to them, “There’s no excuse.” These are the people SUPPORTIVE of others. Gosh. Hope I never meet the people who aren’t!) Sometimes, I just can’t help but feel my eyes roll up in my head.

I call this the “bon-bon theory” … the paradigm that if a person is severely overweight, it’s obvious they got that way from severe gluttony (as opposed to metabolic problems). 382 extra pounds of bon-bons! Yeah… riiiight.

Living with severe morbid obesity for years, and this after formerly being a performer, where looks and how people reacted to me were a big deal, has been a helluva education in “social stigma” and “assumptions” and “biases”.

If I were black, with magenta hair and a nose ring, a lesbian, and an open pagan witch, I would not get half the bias I get for being so obese. (I’m just trying to think of groups of people that commonly deal with unfair bias, for that example.)

Obesity is the one stigma that transcends all colors, cultures and other social groupings. When it comes to weight, most people are not biased: they despise all severely obese people equally. It’s usually not-quite-hidden, of course, in sneers they can’t quite prevent, in active avoidance (conversations that go carefully around you, or don’t even hear you), sometimes in instant hostility with no cause (such as women who project their self-loathing on you the instant they see you, as if you are taking on not only the weight they’ve been fighting with terror, but everything else they hate about themselves as well).

And a great deal of that bias is because of THE BON-BON THEORY: because people feel certain that when they meet me, and I weigh so much, my gosh how I must be the most insanely gluttonous, lazy person alive. I can sit down to dinner with them and eat 1/3 what they do, and that won’t keep them from critically eyeing my plate as if I shouldn’t be eating that. They’re completely unaware and unapologetic that they’ve just eaten enough carbs and calories for 2 days in a single meal — if it doesn’t make them fat personally, they’re oblivious!

The body wants to eat its weight in calories, usually. And severely heavy bodies tend to need energy to lug it around more than smaller ones. So there are plenty of obese people who “eat more than a thin person would” — and that’s considered overeating. I consider that eating for their weight. It’s eating enough to gain more weight that is overeating. I’ve seen fat people ‘overeat’ who didn’t when thin; it was their changing metabolism that made them fat, and as they got fatter, their body demanded more calories and more carb-energy so they began eating more.

As I know from my experience, sometimes “overeating” can simply consist of ingesting one meal a day even at calories less than half the basal metabolic rate. If your body is thrifty enough and concerned enough for your survival, you could store carrot sticks and cottage cheese in fat cells just to be safe. You might not have much energy, but anybody obese can say to that, “So what’s new.”

Obesity is the one stigma that transcends all colors, cultures and other social groupings. When it comes to weight, most people are not biased: they despise all severely obese people equally.

Someday, just as an experiment, I’d like to rig a wetsuit to add about 300lbs to someone’s body. Put it on anybody, and then say, “Alrighty then! Go about your day.” And watch how easy it is NOT to function with that much weight, how exhausting the smallest things are.

Recently I bought a pair of tennis shoes; finally, shopping in the men’s dept., I found some that were wide enough in side and toe-box to fit me. I’d been wearing slip-on shoes, zero padding or support, for years. I didn’t realize until I began wearing the shoes, that when I was not wearing them, I was walking normally — that is to say, I was “slowly hobbling,” with every step in major pain, especially if I’d had to spend any time walking on hard floors (say, shopping at walmart). I didn’t realize how MUCH pain I was in with every step until I got shoes, and enough of it went away to make me aware of it.

Add that, and chafed-to-bloody thighs and under-breast areas, and other really charming side-effects of severe obesity, and nobody oughtta be wondering why the severely obese are not more active. Most of them don’t even want to MOVE. Any of my thin friends, if they had the conditions of raw skin I’ve had over the years, they not only wouldn’t be walking around shopping trying to pretend they weren’t in pain, they’d be in ER! They’d be off work, well bandaged, getting major sympathy from friends. But no, when the conditions are a side effect of fat, that humiliating condition, people won’t admit to it. They will just hobble, and walk slowly trying not to move their legs much, or try not to move too much lest a bra rub an already raw and bloody chafing area, and maybe even cause them to embarrass themselves by crying out in pain in public.

I’ve *gained* weight while eating less than half my BMR in calories and doing aerobics. You can ruin your insulin and metabolism, and I guess I did. Now, I resent being considered a lazy pig. That is not always the cause of obesity. It’s a horrible prejudice. Lowcarb is the ONLY thing that my body responds to for weight loss. I could cry for not finding it 15 years earlier. But I have it now.

So I guess you might say, that being really obese is hell enough. People — whether fat, thin, formerly-fat, or what, who add to that daily unjoy extensive public opinions about how, ‘come on, they know, they were really a pig and it made them fat so most others who are really fat are just pigs too, fess up y’all!’ — sigh. I don’t say much (and nothing in those areas) because I respect everybody’s right to say what they think, and especially to talk about their own experience.

But it is a little frustrating that it seems to just perpetuate the bon-bon theory in the world at large, and to even see it IN the lowcarb field, where more recognition of insulin and other metabolic issues exists than anywhere, is such a bummer.

I am currently tracking my weight, my calories, my carbs, my protein, and for 18 days straight I have lost half a pound a day. According to my basal metabolic rate, compared to calories, I should be losing twice that much. And I’ve eaten the calories I eat now without low carb and still gained weight. So obviously, it is not about calories or food ingestion in SOME cases.

Binging is an eating disorder. Not all severely obese people have an eating disorder, though most of them clearly have a metabolic disorder even if it is combined with an eating problem in some cases. Yes, it’s fair to call “binging made them fat” a bit of a ‘generality’.

But as long as an entire class of people are sneered about, dissed, etc. based on a “generality,” it is still plain and simple, PREJUDICE.

Which frankly is pretty lousy no matter what it’s about.

Hmmn. I think this is my first rant on this blog! Heh. Now it’s “real.” ;-)

Time… slips away, you know
Seems like every day it goes
A little bit faster
For me

Calendar books are fine
Watches that keep the time
But they don’t explain this kind
Of mystery

Oh, all I know
Is just another day gone

I’m not the best at
These kind of tests, I get
A little bit nervous
Every time

Some spinning days
I can’t remember my age
It shouldn’t matter if I’m late
We’re moving at the same rate

Oh, all I know
Is just another day gone

Time goes past
By so fast
Oh, we all know,
It’s just another day
It’s just another day gone

It’s just another day…

Another Day Gone
lyrics to a song by me, circa 1991

Every day, another day of our lives pass.

I’m older today. Wiser? Maybe. Can’t help but notice that I’m going to be moving along, every single day, whether I like it or not. Time, inexorable, never stops. A month from now, you and I are going to be one month older, no matter what.

Days are the currency of our life span. How will you spend them?

Next week, I will be a few pounds lighter. This week, I am a few pounds lighter than last week. And even when the weight on the scale isn’t falling much, my size is gradually changing, my limber ability to move around improves.

Some days, it seems like I am challenged anew to stay on my eating plan. I don’t have much problem with wrong-foods but a couple times I have. Usually it involves someone setting something sweet and bready down by me; I’m nearly beginning to think they should pay as much attention to banning donuts in public places as cigarettes.

Haha. I’m kidding, of course. A red-state libertarian, I don’t believe they should ban anything. Unless it’s done at the state-level, so people can move to the states with the laws they best agree with. And then, such banning should be by vote of the people or at least their representatives, not by old dudes in robes.

Then again, I don’t believe the gov’t should be in bed with the AMA, FDA, USDA, and all the corporate marketing interests that are perfecting their ability to kill our population verrrry slowly, so that we require the most amount of eternal ‘treatment drugs’ (which in turn cause other problems), either. Without which, the issue of banning junk would be a smaller issue for sure.

I once read this book called ‘murder by injection’ that was a detailed history of the founding of the AMA. Two other things it covered were
(a) a 1986 supreme court ruling from a case that proved the AMA had a mass conspiracy to discredit and destroy chiropractry (which was/is also heavy on nutrition and preventative medicine), by tactics that were basically just like the mob, and
(b) it had at the time of its writing, the board of directors of many gov’t food- and health- related agencies, chemical corps, food corps and media corps, and then told you how they all related. All these people are related to each other.

It was probably one of the most shocking books I ever read. Privately published I believe, for obvious reasons, though I bet it can be found if one searches. The guy who wrote it was what I call an american paranoid, someone who is probably a bit obsessive but who has spent half their life in the library of congress researching stuff, and who has the good sense to provide facts that could be followed up on for confirmation, not just claims.

Gosh, how I digress. I was actually talking about time… and how time keeps moving on, every day, no matter what.

Yesterday I was tempted to eat something not lowcarb. And before I did so, I thought about it, and realized something a friend said to me long ago was right:

It really doesn’t matter how long it takes you to lose weight. There is no point in my being demoralized over the long time period I am looking at, due to my size. The reality is that a year from now, we’re going to be a year older. We can either be a year older fatter, the same, or thinner. It is totally up to us. But the time is pointless to stress about, since the TIME is going to happen either way.

The reality is that a year from now, we’re going to be a year older. We can either be a year older fatter, the same, or thinner.

I imagined myself in my tomorrow, looking back at having blown it in the today. It wasn’t a good feeling.

I thought about how blowing it can screw up insulin balance, cause cravings, sometimes lead to being off the wagon entirely. I thought about how I lost 71 lbs about 18 months ago (in 3 months) and felt so great, and then the pressure of family and high-carb foods and time and convenience made me make the lousy decision to go off low carb (and back to mainly fast food), which resulted in me starting over 60 lbs heavier on 9/18. I thought about how I felt when I restarted. About looking at the scale number and thinking, “What if I had been on lowcarb the last year and a half? What number would that be now? How much less time would I have stretching into the future for weight loss to some healthy place?” It was a form of grief.

And then I imagined myself in a year, looking back on this year as a failure, being even heavier, and it was SO depressing.

Then I made a major effort to imagine myself in the future — in tomorrow, in next week, next month, and next year — damn proud of myself, so relieved, so glad about what I had accomplished. I closed my eyes and let those emotions really build inside me, higher and stronger, I was THERE, I had DONE IT. And the biochemicals of self-confidence and pride and success started flowing through me. And by the end of the brief visualization, I was done.

I would not be eating over-carbs that day.

This is a simplified version of a basic NLP technique. Act-as-if. Imagine you have the power, imagine that whatever you are having trouble dealing with is ALREADY DONE, and you are feeling great about it, and you are telling your friends about it, and you are making some hilarious story about it for others.

We are the heroes of our own movie of life. I love my MP3 player because I can put on something upbeat and classical and imagine that my actions have a soundtrack, as if I am in a character in a movie, and these are the things I am seen doing — eating well, counting carbs, moving around even when I don’t feel like it — which I know is leading up to that happy ending.

Sometimes I tell myself, that if I were thin, I would exercise every day, and I would eat really well. Then I think, wait a minute. If I behaved that way now, I eventually WOULD be thin. And more importantly, by the time I got there, I would not be “reverting” to lousy habits that cause weight regain, it would simply be a way of life for me. If I daydream of that perfect-me who has the discipline to get up in the morning and exercise, why not make that real? Why does that person have to live in my head for the future? Why not make that who I am right now?

My whiner self complains. It points out that I cannot really exercise in a ‘real’ way at the moment. My attempt to do the ’slow burn’ exercises, which are ideal for everyone but especially the obese, were utterly hilarious. I couldn’t actually do even ONE slow situp or pushup for example, and let’s not start on how hard it was to get off the floor, let alone rolling around like a beached whale while down there. But despite that, I have to say: I felt decent about myself after trying.

I felt like just the effort to put on some clothes I could exercise in (at my weight, putting on clothes IS exercise), and to do what I could — no matter how pitiful compared to my former athletic self when young — was something. That it mattered. That it was a healthy habit. Most importantly, that it was the kind of habit that “a person in charge of their life, disciplined and successful, would have.” No matter what the scale or inches said, that made me feel like I was accomplishing something.

So I have a new plan. I call it “Will-Building.”

My goal is that every single evening, I will come up with one specific thing that I will accomplish the next day. It might be ’sufficient protein’ one day and ‘exercise’ the next. Ideally it will be the same thing for a week but as days and circumstance vary it might not be. It might even be ’shopping on my own at super walmart’ (a whole exercise regimen of its own, sheesh). It might be ‘recording everything I eat’. It should be whatever I want most but have trouble doing consistently.

It isn’t about me not being fat. It’s about me being the person I want to be. That is a much bigger picture of my life.

And when I can go 7 days successfully doing ONE thing each day that I plan ahead of time, then I want to make a goal of TWO things for each day for the next 7. If I blow it, I start the day 1-7 count over, until I have seven consecutive days of accomplishing that number of items.

(I got this idea from nuidog’s ‘cheat-free’ approach on lowcarber.org. But I don’t have a problem cheating. I have problems eating enough, taking enough supplements, drinking enough water, or exercising. I very seldom am even tempted with the idea of cheating by eating the wrong foods, and so far have never given in to it.)

The goal is not about losing weight, and it is not really about food though it can be. To me that’s what makes it more important: although it is being initially applied toward such goals, the base of the exercise is much larger in scale.

It isn’t about me not being fat. It’s about me being the person I want to be. That is a much bigger picture of my life.

It is about being in charge of my own life. In many of the more esoteric traditions I’ve studied over the years, the first exercises are all about self-discipline, about learning to use the will as the muscle it really is, to make proactive changes in your body, your life and your whole reality. It isn’t really any different with losing weight; I want to cause change in accordance with my will.

So first, I have to get my will cleaned up and shaped up and focused, so it can function as the powerful, life-changing (and sometimes even world-changing) tool it is capable of being.

Every day that I do my will, that I exercise my discipline, is — just like if I had NOT done so — another day gone. That day is going to pass no matter what I do.

Every time I look at the scale, I am not looking at what I accomplished right then, I am looking at what my will helped me to accomplish the previous day, week, month, year. Those days are going to go by for me, whether I am lowcarb or not, whether I am disciplined or not. Every week I am going to look back at and feel good — or not — about what I have accomplished.

So in the end, always, it’s just another day gone. Days are the currency of our life span. How do you want to spend them? How do you want to feel when you look back a month from now?

And regardless of how many pounds you’ve lost or muscle you’ve gained, what have you done for your sense of control over your life?

Is losing weight only about food for you, or is it just one part of an over-all “Will-Building” effort that looks to make the most of yourself in every possible way?

Have you any idea how much protein you’re supposed to have per day if you weigh “anything over 250 pounds?” Something like 120-140 grams. And that’s keeping it at the 250 lbs level, mind you — there is no actual level for higher weights at last count. I’d have to be fed protein slush intraveneously or something, until finally I was noticeably smaller than my refrigerator.

Speaking of refrigerators, when you start lowcarbing you promptly realize you have too many cupboards and not enough refrigerator. It’s crazy. Everything has to be refrigerated except the various LC ‘ingredients’ like flours and sweeteners and flavorings and such. My refrigerator is as fat inside as I am outside. Every time I open it I am assaulted by things like flying cheeses hurling themselves off the shelves at me. Do you think this is a message.

Speaking of messages, the lowcarb forums are interesting, in that the boards are pretty boring for the most part and not much messaging — and too big a % in newbies who apparently can read forums but not their own diet books — but the journals sections are much cooler. It’s kind of novel, you read enough of someone’s journal and you feel like you know them. There are people I feel fond of like they are sisters, and people I admire like crazy and want to be more like. I’m in online forums for other topics — or rather I was, until the 18th when I went low carb and totally swore off all the other junk keeping me online too much, even though some of them are big projects I’m owner of — but other topics don’t seem to inspire the personal level of bonding that LC journaling does. Maybe because it’s a vulnerable state of mind, working with food which is pretty intimate, and problems and ego-security etc.

Speaking of egos, I find it humorous that people can be just as hardheaded and opinionated about food as about every other topic I’ve seen online. Apparently, any place where humans gather, there’s going to be dispute — there are probably serious arguments even on basket-weaving forums. (Now there’s an art that gets a lot of undeserved humor and flak.)

Which reminds me of flax — yes, this is a stream of consciousness blog day — I’ve been continuing my experiments. So far two variations on the crepes have failed miserably. I just want one un-sweet enough, soft and flex enough, yet firm enough, that I can have a tuna-mayo rollup. Is that so much to ask. This having to come up with something to cook every day and night and even morning is ridiculous. I’ve gotten some great advice about stuff to keep onhand and cooking one day a week. Hoping to get up the energy to do half a day full of cooking this weekend…

…and speaking of this weekend, I have an appointment to spend essentially all my spare money to go buy a quarter of a cow. That’s right, 25% of the meat from an animal I’m sure was lovely and sentient but now is dinner. The former vegetarian in me still has a twinge of guilt—but not much, heh, since this is a free range grass-fed non-drug cow, and that’s the kind of life I’d like to support for anything we eat.

And speaking of eating, I can’t seem to eat often enough, or eat enough protein when I do. Stallone puddings may save my life, since I’m pretty sure I can eat chocolate pudding (and it’s pretty snack-pack cheap-tasting-but-good) any time I like and getting 20g of protein out of it rocks. Otherwise, I am basically stuck eating meat.

Speaking of meat, today I had an 8oz round sirloin made on the foreman grill, with a salad in a bag they call ‘field greens’ that is filled with weird junk I’ve never seen before and is nearly as scary as japanese food, and I even had 4oz of sausage and an egg as well, and STILL I am at less than half my ‘required protein’ for the day. Even though I’ve eaten so much I’ll be stuffed till tomorrow. Then the cycle starts all over again, and I’ll be hunting and gathering and foraging for sufficient protein.

And again, will probably end up eating a big chunk of cow. Speaking of…

I SO have the urge to experiment with the ‘deep fried donut’ recipe.

No. That has nothing to do with cows. Why would you think it did? :-)

There is no time like the present, as they say.

It helps to realize the present is a gift indeed. The point of power is NOW, as Seth once said.

Today and yesterday I’ve run into the much more mundane side of my eating plan (don’t say diet). Coincidentally (is there such thing really?), I’ve also gotten some great advice spontaneously from a couple others just at the very time I needed it most, about how to deal with it all even when the chips are down. Not that we would dream of eating chips, hahaha. (Thanks you guys.)

I’ve always thought that the big things in life were the easier things. You know, give me the do-or-die challenges, I’ll bleed for the cause, no problem. I was the kind of teen that casually read the whole textbook in the first two days, aced the tests through the term — and nearly failed for a lack of homework points (in part caused by reading Robert Heinlein et al. through the rest of the course). I think in some respects this sums up my life in many ways. I love big jobs and big tests. It’s the long term stuff that makes me groan.

The real work of life is the day in, day out, seemingly endless stick-to-it-ness that defines “persistence” and “consistency.” Those things are so much harder. The dogged day-by-freakin-day of it. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about working on an eating plan or working on building a boat, working on a talent/skill or working on being a good parent. The toughest works in life for me are not the gigantic challenges to courage, competence or creativity that come along sometimes, but the death by a million papercuts of getting up and ‘dealing with’ it, whatever IT is, every day … by endless day.

I always admired pioneer women. I always wondered what was in it for them. Work insanely hard through childhood, marry young, have too many kids, be essentially a slave from dawn till dusk with the kids and house and farm and food and usually die in childbirth. Nothing against men, but I think if it had been up to men to be that stoic our whole civilization would have died out before it even began. The ability to do the long-term shouldering of the drudgery of daily life and still be wily in bed and happy at holidays and sweet for the little ones is a distinctive quality of humanity of either gender, but throughout history, women have really borne the pain of it, in more ways than one. Sometimes when I am whining about feeling like I spend all my daily minutes on kid, house, food, work, and have no time left for me, for “a life” as I call it, I think about what my life would have been like born 200 years sooner. Or even 100 years sooner. Or for that matter, even 50 years sooner! All in all, I guess I have it pretty easy.

When you turn off the volume from all the philosophy and all the hype and enthusiasm about anything, including the great enthusiasm many share (and thank goodness for that!) about a shared eating plan, you find yourself standing in the deep puddle of The Now. Every moment is a decision. To eat, not to eat. What to eat. Even how to eat. Every day is a new start; is the first day of the rest of your life. Every meal is a chance to confirm your intentions for yourself vs. undermine your own confidence. There is no such thing as history except in our heads. In the real world, it is always the NOW. Decision is always in your court, every moment.

And some days, the decision has to be just to keep on keeping on. Even when nothing is going right in your life or on your scale. Even when nothing sounds good, when you’re out of half your ingredients, when you haven’t time to cook a meal, when you’re exhausted, when it would be so damn easy to walk right across the street and have Taco Bell or McDonalds instead. When you stand in front of your open refrigerator until your eyeballs are getting frostbite and still nothing looks or sounds good, but knowing that maybe for your metabolism, skipping meals packs on pounds, and you better find something no matter how uninspiring. Consider it body-parts in teamwork: you gotta get it down your throat for the sake of your thighs.

When you are not inspired, when the scale makes you want to cry, when your journal buddies are ignoring you, when it seems like the world keeps going around and every day you just have another day of the same damn foods you’ve been boring yourself into culinary comatose with… you just have to be stoic. We are the pioneers of the brand new territory of our own potential. We are the frontiersmen of what we CAN be, if we can focus not on what we fear we might be lost in eternally, but on what we dream we could be eventually, and we start by being that, acting as-if, right NOW.

Every decision in the Now wears a groove in our forever.

Every moment is now. Right now, reading this, you are in the NOW. The present is the only place where you can change your life: what awesome opportunity! This is your point of power, of decision, of inspiration — and yes, sometimes, of putting your shoulder into it and plodding on another mile when you already feel like you’re worn to the bone. Sometimes, just eating another freakin egg or salad feels like getting up at dawn to push the plow. But we don’t have to look at the road behind or the years ahead. We don’t have to look at every food we’ve had and will have. Narrow the focus to the present: life is only the small segment of momentary awareness we call the NOW.

If I can start at 482 pounds and some days be crazy-weary over food and want to hide my head about the scope of my journey, I think other people can start wherever they are and survive the down days too. We’re a stoic sisterhood (and brotherhood) of people who’ve pushed the plow of eating-plan determination in the ever-present Now long enough to know it’s worth it. I will make good decisions, because it’s me in control of making them, because living in the present allows me to change my life.

Every good decision we make wears a neural pathway in favor of our tenacity, in favor of our determination. Every decision in the Now wears a groove in our forever. “Be here, now,” as the Eastern sages say: every moment is now, and the now is always.

I’ll push the plow another day.

There is no time like the present… and the present is a gift indeed.
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I’m pleased that my activity level has gone up so much in the last few days. I feel kind of proud of myself. Ya just wouldn’t believe the amount of self-discipline and willpower and sheer effort it takes to be active in any way at my weight. I’m really working hard at it.

I’ve gone from being on my feet a total of 10 minutes a day (pre 9/18) to being on my feet several hours a day (mostly with cooking, cleaning and shopping). And I’m doing more ‘going out to the car and going somewhere and coming back’ since I’m now driving kid to/from school, as well as all her karate/dance lessons etc. (and shopping etc.) Pre 9/18 I’d get to the car and have to pant for awhile. I have to say my oxygen absorption has improved by light years, as I can now do quite a bit of exercise without panting. I may breathe more deeply but it’s not the same.

My body, however, has its own opinions about my enthusiasm. My feet ache with every step, my knees don’t want to bend, and if I bend at the waist or lean sideways, muscles all the way around my torso and especially in my back cry out in such pain that I wail out loud. Every motion is harder, even getting into my bed or getting up from a chair.

I spent 15-20 minutes in the kitchen this morning and had to leave because I was to the point where I could barely move. I dropped a lid and the thought of having to bend over another time to pick it up nearly made me cry. As fast as I could I grabbed my food and got out of there so I could go sit down and rest my back.

I feel like I got run over by something big and mean.

Not to be picky, but if your body is a temple, surely your kitchen is a divine location of sorts.

The source of nurture on occasion as well as nourishment, the kitchen holds the building blocks of our determination, our inspiration, and our dedication. When you eat real food, it doesn’t come in a fastfood bag… it comes from the kitchen.

Yesterday I paid my housekeeper/friend a whole lotta money to–while I was working–’deal with’ my kitchen in more than the ordinary way. The endless odd plastic containers DH has collected we either threw away or, in the case of a couple dozen half gallon coffee containers, tossed in the backyard garden for seed starting or whatever. Every pan and utensil that had rust (!) on it, we threw away. Every appliance got cleaned, the appliance & lowcarb shelves got cleaned, all the cabinets got wiped out, many of their dishes got rewashed, and so on.

It’s not done. Well that part is, but there is more. But it’s a great start. By the time I finally got back to the kitchen (at nearly midnight when I returned with groceries) it was looking downright CLEAN for the first time since I mistakenly, in my single mom exhaustion, handed it over to the SO, who is becoming more the IO by the day.

I still have a massive fridge-freezer cleanout to do, and big table/counter cleanup, and some shelves I want to get rid of — I have to walk sideways to get in my kitchen. This is going to stop. — and the spice cabinet, but I’m not picky. Already it is a place where I actually WANT to prepare food. Unlike the last couple weeks of avoidance, now finally, it’s FUN to be in there!

This leads me to more armchair theorizing. We generally avoid stuff we aren’t fond of, even subconsciously. And I’m starting to think that the degree of respect that we have for what we eat shows, not only in what we buy and what we eat, but also in how we prepare it.

Recently on a lowcarb forum a woman was saying that prior to lowcarb, she was obsessed with food, ate all the time, and that LC had saved her from that, made her full all the time, killed the carb addict cycle, etc. I found that interesting, because with me, it is just the opposite. I’ve never really even cared about food. If it’s in front of me and I like the taste I’ll eat it. If it’s not, I won’t eat. I’ve never respected food, I am realizing. I hardly even paid attention to it. If I had food, I scarfed it down with barely a shred of notice, while programming usually, or on the way somewhere, or standing in the kitchen. If me and food had a ‘relationship’, you might say I severely took it for granted as a result, treated it very poorly.

The idea of actually planning a yummy meal, and preparing that meal, and sitting down and really ENJOYING that meal, is something I haven’t even considered in… well, since my mid 20’s when I lived alone (the only period of my life I’ve lived alone).

And a nice kitchen is part of that. I just realized how many cool versions of baking pans I have, like muffin pans but in tons of shapes and sizes and molds. I forgot! They’ve all been up on an unreachable shelf for a year and a half. Now suddenly I see them and I think of all the great recipes I’ve seen online that could be made in them. I was eyeing my rotisserie, my deep fryer, my yogurt maker, my ice cream machine, my food processor, my dehydrator, and more appliances, all of which were covered with dust from disuse (many never used at all, bought in the last 1.5 years), now which are gleaming white on the white ‘appliances’ shelf just outside the kitchen, and I was thinking: gosh, so many great things to make! I bet the kid would love this, and that! And wouldn’t it be great to make this other thing for thanksgiving, so the diabetics in my stepmom’s family would have something yummy they could eat? And imagine doing this or that as a treat for the kids’ classroom! And I could invite my parents to dinner and make — oooh, yum!

There is some part of me that feels like cleaning and organizing my kitchen, is cleaning and organizing a part of myself and my life on a larger and deeper scale as well (sort of a Feng Shui result). Much like the ritual of prayer, it’s a small thing on the outside, but a galaxy of meaning on the inside.

Tonight I have planned a chicken and spaghetti-squash primavera dinner, with a small side salad with avocado and pecan and homemade blue cheese dressing, some corn on the cob for the kid and dh, and if I have time, some zucchini cobbler-ettes (that’s the stuff that tastes amazingly like apple pie) for dessert. I’m excited to make it, it’ll be fun to have the kid help me, and I think eating it will be awesome.

Now I am realizing: I don’t have a table! The dining area is taken over by DH’s computer testing station and ebay inventory. The other 2/3 of the living/dining room are split between he and my workstations. My dining table is in the small kitchen pretending to be a counter. The only room for even the smallest table for eating would have to be outside!

It seems dysfunctional to me that we don’t have any place to eat! It reminds me of that movie “Mermaids” (Cher, Winona Ryder, Christine Ricci) where the dysfunctional single mom makes nothing but finger foods and they all eat while sitting on counters and whatever. The first time they really sit down at a table for a family dinner, with her new boyfriend, it’s wonderful, and she realizes abruptly that he is ‘making them a family’ (and flips out, feeling threatened).

I wonder if on some level this relates to our rather un-family situation. That we don’t have a family table or anywhere that we can sit down and ‘be together’. Probably.

But enough psychoanalysis. Back to the kitchen. I cleaned off the rolling cart-thing for food prep, and now it actually stores lots of useful stuff at hand. Last night while shopping I also got a couple new pans and tools (to replace those icky that we tossed) and some cooling racks. And two nifty rectangle wooden trays (molded a bit bowl-like but flat at bottom) I thought were really nifty, that I thought would be cool for holding food instead of a normal plate and less likely to spill (given our lack of table) for wettish foods. And I think I have finished shopping finally. I got all the stuff we were missing (basic kitchen stuff, we were out of like everything!) and lots of stuff for cooking.

Now I have to figure out what to do with the butternut squash I decided to buy and look for some moderate-carb recipe for as a side dish; is there a way to make it sweetish, I wonder. I’m starting to look at veggies, given we have a major garden, and think, “What can I grow that I could eat?” That would surely save money!

It’s kind of exciting. It’s like a whole new interest in life…. FOOD! And a great part of that is now thanks to having a clean, organized kitchen I want to get creative in.

Be careful what you ask for, people always say, and of course they’re right.

After telling my husband I would be doing the shopping, cooking and cleaning from now on, today was a real alpha-test of just how practical this is.

I got up at 6 and did some email, showered, woke up the kid, then spent an hour cooking and cleaning in the kitchen, just in time to scarf down food and drive her to school. Came back just in time to get ready for work at 8:30. Got off work just before 6pm, just in time to go to the grocery store and shop as we’re missing many core ingredient-foods. Got home just in time to take the kid to her dance class.

Class finished, dropped her friend home, and went to the store to shop for the ton of stuff I discovered we don’t have in the kitchen. (Why is it that he doesn’t buy all the non-food stuff needed, like paper/foil/plastic wraps, storage containers, paper towels, etc.? And we were out of every basic thing (like mayo, mustard). And my housekeeper stayed extra and cleaned out the cupboards today and we threw away a bunch of rusty stuff so I needed some new pans and implements.)

We were also shopping (me and the kid) allegedly to buy her a couple clothing items but that was a real disaster of stubborn bad fashion taste and arguing with mom I don’t want to get into right now, as I just found emotional equilibrium and don’t want to blow it haha. Then I came home and, mercifully, talked DH into helping me bring the bags in from the car. Finally got all the stuff put away. It was midnight.

I normally spend about 5-10 minutes a day on my feet. Today it was well over 4 hours. My shoes are basically a form of house shoe, no padding/support whatever. My feet think they are in hell. I could barely walk by the time I got home.

And I never got a chance to eat after 8:30am.

I fell asleep sitting up an hour or so ago and just woke up, briefly I think, realized it’s tomorrow already, and I have to get up in 4.5 hours.

Of course, this is the life I led for five years of single motherhood. This was one reason why, despite 4 of 5 years of marriage being to a ‘roommate/friend’, despite 5 years of single motherhood, I agreed to have her dad move back in with me — I was so exhausted, and she was starting to do poorly in school, get chubby, I thought some help with good food and her schedule and having a dad around who could do exercise-ish things with her and so on might help. He hasn’t really been all that useful, so that’s that. But I see that a year and a half of pawning off responsibility for the food-world on someone else has made me soft!

And this day has made me utterly exhausted. Have you any idea how much fun it is NOT to walk around on bad shoes carrying well over 400lbs? With a body that adiposity mis-aligns in spine and hips, and with thighs too big so preventing straight steps, so the process is more like a slightly hunched forward Frankenstein duck-waddle?

The average person has a hard enough time exercising; note how few gym memberships are used after 3 months. Even just moving, for life, let alone exercise, is insanely more complicated and difficult and severely un-fun when a person is overweight, and more obese they are, the moreso.

For breakfast I got the kid kiwi fruits and I’m making soyrizo & eggs, and for lunch… I dunno. I have a lot of food. I don’t think I could stuff another egg into my fridge right now. I need to dedicate quite a bit of time to a massive fridge cleaning… next project!

For another day. My feet are unconscious. My head keeps lolling, I am that wiped out. My daily personal “activity level” has just jumped by several orders of magnitude. I hope, eventually, this is a positive thing for my metabolism, at least! All this motion… so suddenly… is crazy.

Back to sleep now.

I’m gradually coming to believe that eating lowcarb isn’t remotely difficult, in general. Dealing with the people around you, related to your eating lowcarb, is another story.

There’s the endless advice, even from people overweight–as long as someone is thinner than you are, they feel that bestows expertise. People who want you to eat dessert so they’ll feel better doing so. People who want to call lowcarbing a ‘fad’ and lecture you about how ‘too much protein hurts you!’ ’cause they saw it on TV. Not like they have any clue how much is needed, is too much, is recommended, etc. Between absurd rudeness and social stupidity, it’s amazing I’ve gotten through eating in restaurants and other homes for holidays as often as I have.

The only small favor that weighing nearly 500lbs has done me is that unlike being 30-100lbs overweight, at least once I gained enough, I no longer had men constantly coming on to me with the memorable line that they’d like to “work it off me” — snort! There’s romance. Or the ones who assured me up front they like ‘that kind of woman’. Oh where’s my bucket. Please.

But of all the BS I’ve gotten socially over the last 15 years of being really severely obese, I don’t think anything has been as difficult to deal with as the reaction (or lack of it) to my finding a way of eating that would work and going on the plan to make it happen.

My husband is responsible for the food, since I work and whatever he makes in his sometimes computer work, he doesn’t contribute to the family (an issue I am suddenly about to have An Issue With. Is this my new energy, from eating lowcarb, showing its head?). He was perfectly happy to arrange McDonald’s or frozen taquitos and once in awhile cook something. He has made a few lowcarb dinners at my request. But otherwise, there is always some reason that he is too busy to cook, or that he can’t arrange for food at any other times, or that he does the shopping but he can’t keep meat in the house, or I buy it and stick it in the chest freezer in the garage and he promptly piles so much junk on top of it it can’t be opened.

I pay for a maid to come in every week and make the entire house spotless, especially the kitchen. I wash, rinse and put in the drainer or put away every dish I use for anything. So he is the only one cooking stuff. And he only cooks maybe 3x a week, usually when nagged, often not ready till 9pm. Yet the kitchen is always a disaster, I mean terrible. Simply wanting to make a protein shake requires courage and a strong stomach (and flying-bug-killer) to enter. So now I am lowcarb… and I need to make food for myself. I go into the kitchen and it’s revolting. He says I am ‘easily grossed out’. Yes. I am.

F***ing communism. I swear I sometimes think growing up under it (he escaped from Czech when the iron curtain was in place) created some kind of welfare mentality for life.

Lowcarb has made me realize something. My lack of energy, my despair at how exhausting it is to drag this whale-sized body around, my fear of not being able to do things I need to do — from getting something off a high shelf (try standing on a chair at my weight!) to just shopping or taking out the trash — it has profoundly impacted my decisions in life.

I have decided that now that lowcarb has given me the energy to care, the energy to be indignant, I’m going to do something about it. I am taking it back. It is MY HOUSE. As of now the kitchen is MINE. I finally have the energy to do some cooking and cleaning and what I lack, my ten year old daughter is going to learn to help with so we can pull it off.

I feel like he has contributed to the weight gain I had over the last 1.5 years, to the chronic asthma from foods he knows I can’t eat without gluten-response but makes for me anyway because it’s easier to make that than worry about it. I wouldn’t make him food he responded that way to. He just doesn’t care. I was on low-carb when he arrived, I’d lost 70lbs and felt great, but with his insisting on filling the house and the kid and dinners with carb-junk, going out a lot so I was always trying to pick-around stuff with too many carbs, gradually sent my carb count up until cravings overwhelmed me and one night I went off the wagon, and only climbed back on 56 lbs to re-lose later. He doesn’t spend any time with the kid, either, doesn’t even talk to her unless he’s griping, and that’s the only reason I agreed he could come back here. I am fed up.

I have decided that I am going to cook food that is lowcarb. And he and the daughter — both of whom are overweight! — are going to eat it, or they can starve. I pay the rent and buy the food. I care what they like, but my surviving to care is more important right now, in my opinion, than their right to live on junkfood. If he wants to have other food he can buy it with his own money.

I can’t believe that after five years separated (and nearly five years of ‘just roommates’ prior) he comes back and hasn’t paid a dime of rent in 16 months, didn’t even buy his kid a birthday present, doesn’t help with anything. He waters the garden, he feeds the cats, and once in a while he cooks. Is this worth putting up with him so his kid can have a dad? Who lives here but totally ignores her anyway, just messes up the house and leeches my money? I don’t think so.

I’m not so scared anymore. I don’t feel afraid that the ‘challenge’ of merely going to the store to buy food will overwhelm me. Thanks to lowcarb and immediate weight loss, I feel like I am capable of what is needed. Not as much as I want, but I’m working on that. Definitely enough.

My parents think that since I am fat, I should be thankful that ‘any man will have me’. Have me! Ha! Like I’m not the one who makes the living. I think my parents’ psychology about fat has sort of influenced me in a way I don’t like. I am taking THAT back too. I deserve a healthy home situation, not dysfunction, because I’m a good person. Weight has nothing to do with it. What other people think means jack to me. I deserve better.

I am sure that in retrospect he will think that lowcarb was the downfall of our situation. I can hear it now. “She went on this diet and then just totally wigged out!”

I call it a low-carb side-effect: finally, I have just enough new energy to insist on what I want from life. Hmmmn. I’d say that’s one of the good side effects, wouldn’t you.
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“Learning theory” is a phrase used to describe the (ongoing, ever-evolving) results of a field of study about how humans perceive, process, and respond to information. It relates to what causes change in the human based on information processing (for better or worse).

As a layman’s paraphrase of the generic basics for an example, let us say that the “action” we wish to ‘train’ is throwing a basketball, aiming to get it through the hoop.

• If you provide accurate feedback to a human following an action, the body/mind perceiving the information — such as “when you threw it exactly like that, it went in” or “when you threw it exactly like that, it bounced off the rim to the left” — will be able to “learn” from this. The feedback is corrective or confirming, both of which ‘teach’ us. So: practice improves most anything, we all know this.
• If you provide inaccurate feedback to a human following an action, the body/mind will learn just as well — it’s simply that what it learns is wrong. For example, if a basketball hoop were specially designed to ever-so-slightly move to the left just after the ball left your hands for the throw, eventually you would use that “corrective” information and begin throwing the ball slightly to the left, in order to succeed.
• If you provide feedback that is highly negative, e.g., every time you throw a basketball someone comes and punches you in the head, then you create an aversion effect, where mysteriously you seem to be losing your desire to shoot hoops (I wonder why!).
• If you don’t provide ANY feedback following an action, or if you provide feedback that does not directly relate to the goal-attempt of the action, eventually you train-out the behavior. If barking at the moon did not get you strawberries, you’d have no reason to do it, and when you wanted strawberries that is not an urge you’d have, as it’d be unrelated to your getting them.

The lack of feedback, and even moreso, “inconsistent” feedback — sometimes accurate, sometimes wrong, sometimes none, sometimes negative — can literally train-out a quality or skill. I believe this is called an Extinction Paradigm. You have basically extinguished that tendency or skillset in the human.

Dr. Batmanghelidj, author of Your Body’s Many Cries for Water, has an interesting idea. He believes that our culture, over time, feeding ourselves and our children drinks that are not water—the body doesn’t by nature know anything but water–we have programmed-out our own innate thirst-reflex. He suggests that when the body asks for water and we give it other stuff, from slightly-off (like koolaid or coffee) to massively-off (like sodas), the body eventually is “entrained” to not ask for water because it isn’t going to get it.

So eventually, the body quits asking. If a desire for clean water brings the minor poison of a soft drink cola, that is not only an inaccurate feedback for ‘thirsty for water’, it’s actually a ‘negative’ aversion feedback.

He believes that over time, we become dehydrated literally to the cellular level. As it is gradual and has been happening over such a long time, we are oblivious to it. All the cells make do with a little less eventually, until finally, side effects start showing up, and then major problems.

He described a linear serious of ailments that can result from chronic dehydration, immensely aggravated by ‘fiber’ supplements that allegedly deal with the symptoms that dehydration caused in the first place, but leech massive water from the body when used, making it worse, making one yet-more dependent on them. I might have been more skeptical about his book except that my father has had every single one of the symptoms and ailments he described, in exactly the same order. I mean what are the odds. Most of these are things that the medical system has no good explanation for the causation of, except “bad luck.”

By the time the body finally asks for water, it is only because it is so incredibly desperate for it, that it is simply is doing anything it can, no matter that the approach seldom works, to try and get your attention to get some.

The doc believes that replenishing the body all the way to the cellular level takes several months of drinking sufficient water daily. Like sleep, it is not something you can just make up all at once.

Soda is NOT water despite that it has water in it. It has to do with how the body processes the water — he has nice little diagrams and simple explanations that even I was capable of understanding. (Although I felt he attributed too much to dehydration, in terms of health problems, aside from that I felt it was a book well worth reading.)

So, let’s look at food. We need nutrients and protein most of all. Our body gets hungry. It starts in childhood, with many. And so we feed it — mac&cheese? A happy meal with fries and coke? At best, that is somewhere between inaccurate feedback and non-feedback if it doesn’t have the nutrients we needed. At worst, given the content of the food and affect on the body, it may be actual aversion training!

Not on a conscious level though. On a conscious level, we love sweet, we feel happy, we’re inundated with marketing, McDonald’s has the Star-Wars toys!, and the sheer mass quantity of sugar/carbs in the meal makes us feel “up-up-up!”, while the drink is cold and fizzy (feel the burn! yeah!). Consciously we’re getting nothing but positive feedback — at first.

Unfortunately, the negative feedback of exhaustion, allergies/asthma, and more don’t come until later, and as learning theory studies have always shown, the sooner the feedback, the greater the likelihood of learning from it. So, 30 minutes or an hour later when your blood sugar might drop is too late for that feedback to do any good for the conscious mind; we don’t necessarily even correlate the two events. Our meal is already long past and forgotten by then.

So at a subconscious level, we have a body-function that eventually is trained out of bothering to really ask for what it wants because it doesn’t get it, or seldom, and often gets something quite bad if it dares ask. No different than a family with an alcoholic angry parent, eventually the child, not sure if they’ll get a kindness, ignored, or often abuse, in response to a question, is just going to avoid asking questions at all. So our bodies learn to avoid asking for what they want.

And at a conscious level, we have a body-psychology that is eventually trained into craving sugar, carbs, cold fizzy drinks, hot coffee, and the feeling of comfortable oversatiation that only eating too much bread-based carbs can give you.

We force the dissociation between body and mind from a young age.

The good doc Batman believes that you can rehydrate your body, heal it, and that gradually when you drink a lot more water regularly, your thirst — for water, not soda or coffee — will actually begin to gradually return. I have experienced this myself. It’s not easy to do since in my case I didn’t like water. I liked soda. But after drinking at least 3qts of water a day for about 10 days, the actual thirst-response started coming back. I started getting thirsty far more often (despite all that water!) and specifically for water, not sugary-carbonated junk.

I correlate this with the fact that some lowcarb docs note that insulin resistance can be lessened, and even Type 2 diabetes lessened greatly, as one eats low-carb and adequate-protein and nutrients finally, and the body gradually begins to heal.

(Not, mind you, that it’s ever going to revert to what we think of as normalcy, as LC Dave points out.)

I am coming to believe that the basics of human learning theory are, unintentionally perhaps, working against us in our culture from the moment we start eating solid foods.

Some think — rightly I suspect — that placing importance on food such as a ‘reward’ is the wrong message to send to oneself, as it ties into the “emotional” issues with eating.

But on the other hand, food is central to physiological survival, and since the dawn of time man’s been generally obsessed with it for necessary reasons. We may not want to have eating tied to our psychology, but the fact is–it is. I don’t think we can wish that away. I think it’s hard-wired into our biology, even if every human culture didn’t steep its people in it.

So my armchair philosophy for the day goes something like this:

• The more that we make lowcarb food important to ourselves;
• the more enjoyment we get from eating it;
• the more positive feedback we get from self or others from experimenting with it, cooking it, sharing with others about it, etc;
• the more we literally create a ‘celebration of food’ gestalt with lowcarb eating;
• then the more we are working to “correct and re-adjust” the psychology about food.

If we eat what we don’t much like or what bores us because we “should,” we are not only NOT working to “correct” our psychology (as much as our insulin-response), we are actually contributing in a negative way to that level of things.

And it seems to me that while we are healing ourselves, we have to consider the mind as well as the body. Our reaction to food goes from the most primal survival level to the most abstracted marketing inference: food doesn’t just move through us, it moves us through and through.

So here’s to creative culinary efforts; to sharing recipes and social bonding over that; to learning to enjoy food preparation; and to making food something special. Drink that protein shake in a princess goblet. Make that chicken with peppers dish or array of veggies and deviled eggs pretty on the plate, it can be done. Those are small ritual elements, but it’s more our effort to pursue them, to take the time to make food a luxury for us, that matters.

Make lowcarb food for the mind and heart, as well as the body.

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When you look at humans in tribal environments, you see that aside from sleep, human rituals and care of the young, nearly all their time is spent working on getting food or in some way dealing with food. For eons with humans, in terms of what one’s time and mind are focused on, there has been a dominant obsession with food. NOT as a ‘concept’, outside of Christmas carols, but as a direct relationship to what you were going to put in your body. The two things — food, and what goes in your body — were not separate.

Nowdays, it’s hard to be bothered with food. We often rush from the moment we get up and get kids to school and get ready for work and work all day and do errands afterwards and outside of our lunch hour or whatever we arrange for dinner, usually we are paying no attention to food. When we do put food in our bodies, it is often based on available time and available energy to prepare, or what is in arm’s reach, or what someone else likes (a kid, mate, etc.).

This is no small issue. Looking at the protein requirements for the average person, and at what they actually eat, I’m willing to bet that most people don’t eat anywhere near enough protein. So they don’t have sufficient energy.

When you have less energy, you get less exercise because you haven’t the gumption to get up and go. When you get less exercise and you’re lower in energy you’re more likely to eat carbs because carbs are energy-in-food. Protein is like power that our body translates into energy internally. Carbs are like external-energy we’re pulling into us to help.

Too many carbs, not enough exercise, lead to weight gain and eventually to insulin resistance, which inevitably amplifies things into more weight gain, which leads to vastly less energy for obvious carrying-it-around reasons, so more craving for carbs to support the body and more insulin resistance and more weight gain — it’s the modern insulin-hamster-wheel of obesity.

So if you ‘track it back’, it seems that a great deal of all the carb-obsessed, nutritionally-deficient, exercise-inhibited problems in our culture, all start at the doorstep of insufficient protein.

Which means if I’m lowcarbing and not getting enough protein, that’s a big deal.

Now, not to be obvious, but in order to get protein, ya gotta EAT. Which I at least won’t do unless I like the taste of what I’m eating. So lowcarb better be yummy or I’m not lowcarbing, I’m fasting.

I suspect the lean-body-mass starvation that is chronic throughout much of human life in our culture, due to protein deficiency, may well contribute to a whole host of medical (and possibly even mental and social) problems far more extreme than just obesity.

Unlike every “natural” culture of humans, who for survival are forced to put a huge emphasis on the acquisition, preparation and storage of food, many people pay incredibly little attention to the detail of the food we put in our bodies.

But it seems almost inbred to humans since the dawn of time, that food’s an obsession with us. And it seems marketing takes advantage of this. You’d never know we weren’t obsessed with food to look at any form of marketing! Magazines and stores and TVs are nearly overwhelmed by the obsession with food. Even the obsession with beauty, health and sex fall second to the obsession with food. (Well, the sex obsession may be catching up, particularly as men become a higher % of the population doing even grocery and furniture shopping.)

So, oddly, it’s as if we are still obsessed about food as a concept, we’re just not really obsessed with the food we put in our bodies.

It’s a form of dissociation.

If we asked our body what it wanted to eat, it would probably give us sexy dreams about steak or fish, broccoli and avocados, strawberries and cold clear water. Somehow, I doubt that apple pie, hershey bars and french fries are of any interest to the body — and to the degree they are chemically bad for the body, even harmful, quite the opposite.

But they’re of huge interest to our brain. Why? Because we’ve been indoctrinated with an obsession about the concept of food, devoid of the context of what we actually put in our mouths.

They’re of huge interest to our palate as well. Why? Because we’ve been eating that way much of our life, in some cases when our parents ate badly all our lives, and we’ve learned to associate that food with ‘getting energy’ we lack, with positive reward from our parents, with sex and fun and other abstracted pleasures in a lifetime subjected to marketing.

Some people feel they have emotional reasons for eating. Personally, I think nearly everybody has emotional reasons for eating (or sometimes for not-eating, which is really the same issue just a different reaction), because nobody in our culture who hasn’t grown up in the closet could have avoided the pervasive influence, since early childhood, of the many messages about and associations with food.

If Jane is thin and eats when she’s upset, nobody even notices. Nobody cares. Jane doesn’t care. She’s thin, why should she care? But if John is obese and he eats when he’s upset, it’s considered a major psychological problem.

If this is a problem, I’d suggest it’s a problem that the vast majority of our culture has — it’s simply that we only notice it or care about it when the metabolism of the individual fails to “compensate” for that.

Since I went back to a lowcarb way of eating, I’ve been almost forced to obsess on the food I put in my mouth. I rather have to, because my normal way of eating is completely different.

To start with, prior to lowcarb, I often ate only one meal late in the day, that’s been my norm for decades. Secondly, whatever I ate was carb-laden and too much (although almost any mega-carb meal is ‘too much’ unless you’re about to work out hard or run a marathon). My family’s idea of food has been fast-food or packaged food with an occasional home cooked meal–rarely. I work and my husband handles the food, animals and garden, and we share the kid duties. He really isn’t interested in cooking every night, let alone to deal with daytime food, let alone even more than that, for arranging snacks or whatever.

This makes my getting sufficient protein very difficult — it’s even difficult to get enough calories, unless I eat something massively high in fat. It means I need to take off work (I work from home, more than 8 hours a day) and go do something about my food.

I am pretty stubborn about food. I can be hungry, and standing looking at a refrigerator stuffed with wonderful fresh foods, and if I don’t feel like eating those foods, I will go hungry and walk away. I’d rather be hungry than eat what I don’t like or don’t feel like. Maybe this means that my psychology has more sway with me than my body… I think that would probably be a fair statement.

I have to like the food that I am eating or I’m not going to eat it, period. Maybe if my parents had forced more veggies on me I’d be different, who knows. I’m finicky as hell. I tend to obsess on a certain food and eat it constantly and then am totally sick of it and can’t eat it for a long time. I get weary of foods easily and really need variety. I behave similarly with other subjects, like music, and personal interests, so I think some of this is just personality.

And perhaps because of my lifetime of eating, my body-psychology (not function) feels a genuine need for something that at least can function-as breadish foods (tortillas and bread) since a ton of other food options — variety! – open up when you have those.

And sometimes, I want sweets. Do I need them? My body doesn’t. My mind apparently does. And maybe that will change. But right now, pretending that is not so would only make me feel deprived and result in me eventually eating off-plan carby-crap that would blow it for me.

So staying on lowcarb is profoundly dependent on my ability to make foods that I like, and enough variety of them that I can stand it. Including breadish stuff and sweets.

There is a good chunk of the lowcarb world online that is fiercely dedicated to the meat-eggs obsession. And it works for ‘em, I’m telling you, most of these people drop weight the way I can drop money at amazon.com — so they’ve got a lot of leverage for respecting their opinion.

But I can’t eat like that. Not sure I can afford it for one. And the “heavy darkness inside me” when I do that is something I really dislike. And I don’t have time for the required cooking, for another. And I just flat out can’t stand it! Perhaps I will evolve into some kind of paleolithic hunter who really just wants to eat meat and steal eggs from nests and forage for roots and berries, but it certainly isn’t that way right now.

Right now, if I’m going to eat twice a day — let alone more often — and if I’m going to get anywhere near the protein and calories I’m supposed to have — I must have good tasting food. Yes! I expect food to be decent tasting! Sue me. Call me a baby. I don’t think it’s a lot to ask. In today’s world of year-round food options at the grocery and online-sales of specialty ingredients, I don’t see why this should be such a big thing to ask for.

I think that I am not alone in this. I think this issue is greatly behind why so many people cannot maintain lowcarb in the long run.

People go offplan dominantly because they want to experience a certain taste that is not on plan. They just can’t stand it, they have got to have the garlic bread and mashed potatoes at the family barbecue, they’ve got to have the cranberry sauce and apple pie at thanksgiving. Now, they might have resisted just one or two things. They would have suffered without their favorite yams, for example. But suffering without all of it — left with plain turkey (gravy is usually made with corn starch) and a few green beans and iced tea, when everyone else is eating richly and drinking eggnog and having warm pies with ice cream — come on.

Let’s get real. This takes monumental willpower on most people’s parts. And if the person has not been eating enough protein, and worse if they’ve been eating stuff like lowcarb bars and other stuff that can spark cravings, their own body is going to be working against them.

If you don’t want your employees to steal, your child to do drugs, and you know they are massively exposed to opportunity and encouragement, you wouldn’t just shrug it off as their problem if they give in to temptation. You remove temptation, or you do something that helps mitigate that circumstance. Usually both.

So in lowcarb, you arrange it so you don’t need to go to the lunch truck for your food. Because let’s be honest, even if they offer a couple very simple foods you could eat, the smell of the spicy deepfried burritos and onion rings is going to whack your whole body hard. The olfactory sense is supposed to be the most powerful memory and pleasure stimulating sense there is, and anybody on a diet who ever smelled something they couldn’t have will easily vouch for that.

And, when you can’t help but be in a situation of massive carby food like family holidays, you provide an alternative: Make your own cranberry sauce, turkey gravy, mashed potatoes, apple pie, and eggnog. Can you do all that on lowcarb?! Sure. OK, it’s true, your “mashers” might be from a different veggie that tastes amazingly like potatoes when done that way; your apple pie might be zucchini pie which also tastes amazingly great in a similar way to apple pie, and there might be a couple specialty ingredients like thickeners and sweeteners to make some of the stuff lowcarb instead of highcarb. So what!

If you eat it all at once, won’t you go over your daily carb limit? Yeah, all at once, almost for sure. But you could have some of all of that, and all together still ingest lest carbs than a ’small’, one-dish ‘cheat’ on normal carby food. That much won’t toss your ketosis generally, and if it causes a few days of carb-cravings you have to beat with protein until they recede, it still is unlikely to have nearly the effect that falling completely off the wagon would.

Some people’s lives depend on staying on lowcarb eating. Going off the wagon (as they say) is not just an issue of blowing a diet. It’s an issue leading to horrifying ailments in diabetics, and horrifying health and lifestyle issues in obese people, and death to both. This is not something that flippancy is appropriate for, or casual reference to ‘well they oughtta have willpower’ or anything like that. That is not a proactive way of approaching the question of how to save lives and pursue health for people. If we want to save the lives of the people, we need to look at the reality of how people do eat, how they need to eat, how they can eat, and do everything we can to work out a plan for ourselves, or our families in need, that lets them have a good food life, while being healthy as well. No eating plan works if they are not on it!

What works for me is food that I want to eat. Sometimes that is steaks and chicken and salad and broccoli and a few berries in a protein shake, perfect for lowcarb. Sometimes, it’s waffles, or something on bread, or chocolate.

There’s only one solution. I have to do enough cooking, experimenting, and gathering recipes, to make myself familiar with a wide variety of lowcarb food options. So if I really want chocolate or lemon or I really want spanish rice or pancakes or eggnog, I have an option to deal with that need.

That need is probably more emotional than physical. But as noted above, it’s likely there are few people who don’t have some degree of psychology involved in their eating, we just only notice it with the overly- fat or thin people. It is still just as real and it still needs to be addressed if the goal is to keep a person eating on-plan.

I’m reading recipes endlessly. I’m collecting favorites like a new fevered-hobby. I’m experimenting daily with what might be edible for me. I’m imagining new variants and possibilities. I got “Rye flavor” bakers use to add to the flaxbread with a little caraway seed for better bread to have open-topped sandwiches with. I’m trying to get this “Oatmeal flavor” to add to flaxmeal cereal with a little brown sugar extract for a hot cereal-like option.

My mouth and my psychology want the taste. My body doesn’t need to really have oatmeal or brown sugar. If I have some of the taste, while I am chewing and swallowing, I am happy. If I try to build in some protein to that, and if other meals better make up the protein/nutrients I might not be getting from that, what difference does it make?? Maybe eventually I can develop more love for what is yet-better food, and less love for stuff that is carbish. But right now, I need to be on the eating plan.

Just like Richard Atkins was not real worried about whether induction phase of his diet was short on veggies, because there was a vastly greater danger of the patient keeling over from a heart attack long prior to a lack of green beans doing them harm — in the same vein, I am just not so worried about whether it is better to only eat proteins or avoid all forms of artificial sweeteners. The bottom line is that if I am staying on plan, then every single day, I am one step closer to saving my own life. Isn’t that really the first and most important thing?

Maybe if I could just ditch a lifetime of breadish-obsession and sweet-needs and chocoholism, I’d be healthier, I’d lose weight faster. But if I want to lose weight at all I have to stay on-plan right? And ‘m not sure that can happen at the moment unless I have more variety in tasty food.

I see a lot of people online when I read various lowcarb forums. A surprising number of the food lists on journals are so dull my entire appetite falls asleep from boredom.

Since I started lowcarb, suddenly, I love food!

I paid almost zero attention to food before this. I ate whatever I felt like that was fast and close at hand. If it wasn’t, I didn’t eat. I ate while doing programming work, while standing, while in the car, with no attention to the detail. My husband learned that if he brought me food I ate and if he didn’t, I didn’t eat. If he brought me two of something, I ate that seemingly happily; if he brought me six, I ate that the same way. If it was there at hand I would eat it. I’ve never really cared much about the detail, except that it has to taste good to me and I can’t be sick of it. I am very focused on whatever I am doing, and food usually has to interrupt that.

My best friend recently pointed out that not only had lowcarb not made me restricted but it had blossomed my entire interest in food. It has! I find it so exciting to go through the options!

Now like humans of old, I am being forced to put a lot of time and attention toward acquiring what will enable me to survive. Far more than normal. At least till I get handle on this. Some may think it’s unreasonable or obsessive, the amount of time I’ve spent on it (I’ve heard this complaint recently). Let ‘em!

My food is gonna taste good, and it’s going to have variety. I insist! I can do this.

Off to the kitchen to experiment.

I remember third grade. Becky had long hair so she got to be the girl in our school play, and I consoled myself that it was my recent haircut that dropped me to the role of Rumplestiltskin, the male magical dwarf-entity that saves the weeping young maid from losing her head (literally) by spinning all the king’s flax into gold. To my credit, my final “angrily stomping into collapse” when she outsmarted me was so convincing that teachers rushed the stage to see if I was hurt. Which kind of stole my thunder I admit. But I digress.

Until a short time ago, I’d never even heard of flax except in that fairy tale. I wasn’t even certain what it was. Some kind of plant. Which apparently in the old days, when there were fairies and kingdoms and spinning wheels were common, could be spun into thread — and in one improbable instance, gold.

The lowcarb world for the last several years has been in the throes of an internet-driven experimental evolution that would make any inventor — and the staunchest capitalist — darn proud. Wow, it’s a different world today than it used to be.

In January 2001 when I first tried lowcarb, the options for “food that wasn’t meat or dairy” were severely limited. I was running the tech side of a small corp with an IT product and working 100 hours a week at least, and a single mom, so with all that available time for cooking… that means none… I lived on microwaved cheese over pepperoni. Pitiful, I know. It worked. But I knew it wasn’t a workable long-term eating plan, which I hoped to have time and readiness for ’someday soon’.

There were other ideas, of course. If you wandered into a lowcarb forum, you could find about 1,742 ways to eat with pork rinds. In pancakes, even! Leery but willing to be brave, I tried it.

I decided I’d rather die.

But that was before the advent of the ready availability of a ton of products that are specific to the lowcarb eating lifestyle. Some just got more popular and available, such as DaVinci’s zillion flavors of sugarfree syrups. Some were brand new.

Sucralose can’t be sold in the US as a sweetener except by Splenda, which finally (thankfully) the market did the hula around (ever the entrepreneurial spirit!) by presenting several products that are “sweetened BY” the stuff — such as the syrups; such as Fiberfit; such as Sweetzfree. They are “not sweeteners, of course…” — of course. They are just (in the case of Fiberfit) 8x sweeter than sugar — or more — and can be substituted for it. How convenient! Thank you. I will happily testify that I use those products only as flavor syrups and fiber supplements, guys—call on me anytime.

Forms of sugar common to the food industry were made available in retail to consumers finally. Erythritol, Isomalt, and Acesulfame-K (that is found combined with Isomalt in the product Diabetisweet) were suddenly as near as Netrition.com. The first two provided the bulk and qualities of sugar. Polydextrose provided bulk if you were going to be using a high intensity liquid sweetener instead. No longer stuck with putting up with Splenda’s carb-laden “filler” material, the whole world of desserts opened up to lowcarbers in a new way.

No longer did a devout LCer have to sadly do without anything remotely sweet — or fall off the wagon entirely when a chocolate craving hit. Now they could make their own desserts and bring ‘em to the party, or have them before or after. LC was now a workable plan even for those who couldn’t live without the occasional dessert.

And no more culinary wallflowers! — every LCer became an ad-hoc chef, experimenting with revamping high-carb products into low-carb alternatives, or creating whole new ideas, and sharing with their LC buddies online, who would further experiment with variations and flavors and ingredients. (For great examples of this fabulous principle in action, check out the Deep Dish Quiche Pizza and Mock Danish threads in the lowcarber forum.)

Much was helped too by the contribution of LC’s favorite real gourmet chef, Karen Barnaby, whose food is sometimes too gourmet-complicated for cooking clutzes like me, but sometimes (like Cauli-flied ‘Rice’) a total savior… and she certainly has made it possible to have a classy dinner with guests, with food everyone will love, and still be lowcarb.

A variety of ingredients that were pretty low in carbs found their way into kitchen labs everywhere. Unsweetened coconut got real popular — there are at least a hundred desserts, cookies, breadishes and more using the stuff. Hard cheeses like parmesan bloomed into new ideas, like as a sort of crunchy coating for the Munchy Parmey Chicken Chunks.

But it just got better. Wheat flour’s carbs got you down? Wheat Protein Isolate 5000 became available, using the protein of the wheat for a flour with superlow carbs and a ton of protein. Vital Wheat Gluten can be added if needed. Almond “meal” became a standard, in part thanks to retailers like Bob’s Red Mill that sold every ‘farm-related’ product you might want, and of course any cook with a coffee grinder could make their own almond meal. It didn’t rise, of course—but it bulked up beautifully, and dense bread was a damn site better than no bread at all. I feel that almond flour was the “idea catalyst” for an explosion of “experimental” use of any product that could possibly be ground into meal that had a fairly low number of carbs.

And the star of flax was BORN!

Flax seed, ‘golden’ or brown, can be milled into a meal. It provides a great ‘bulk’ without any bad taste. And a lot of fiber. And with a few ingredients common to lowcarb kitchen experiments, can make the difference between “making bread in the microwave in 3 minutes” vs. looking mournfully at that egg salad and wishing it had a piece of toast underneath it. You can add flavors, sweeteners or savory spice, and have a dense but not overly heavy bread for anything from cinnamon french toast to caraway-seed sandwich bread. (Great spices at penzeys.com and great extracts at spicebarn.com by the way!)

Is it like “normal” high-carb bread, that is soft-risen inside and thin-crunchy outside? Not really. But since that crap’s gonna kill me anyway, I’m not complaining — flaxbread tastes a darn site better than some “healthy” breads I’ve had in my life and it’s actually good, made well.

Thanks to WPI5K, almond meal, flax meal, and other alternatives — including some “bake mixes” that do for lowcarb what bisquick did for our mom’s generation (such as CarbSmart’s line or CarbQuick), you can create a somewhat different but darn good version of pie crust or cobbler-topping or waffles in the morning.

Flax seed has begun to be used in more and more recipes you’ll find in the online lowcarb world. It’s extremely lowcarb. How else can you get a workable and pretty tasty “breadish” as I call it—any product bread-like—with about 2 carbs and 10g protein per slice? Who’s yer friend baby if it ain’t flax seed?! Philly cheesesteak doesn’t need a fork anymore. My thick garlic cheese spread finally became a workable food again. Chopped chicken in pesto, toaster-oven’d with a little cheese and hot peppers on top, is back on my to-die-for food list. Yay!

The expansion of ingredient-level foods over the last few years has made the lowcarb lifestyle possible even for people who can’t or won’t live solely on meats and eggs and a few fibrous veggies and fruits for the rest of their lives. And for those who worship all things bread-ish but can’t take the gluten without asthma-like effects, flax seed has none of that. Yee. Haw.

The use of a lot of versatile vegetables that nobody’d bothered experimenting with before has opened many doors as well. You might not believe me that cauliflower–which I despise on its own–makes something similar to chicken-fried-rice that is so good, every time I’ve made it for (non-LC) friends they eat theirs and all my leftovers too and rave. Didja know zucchini, prepared a special way, ends up making a helluva pie filling that is a heck of a twin to apple pie? Come on, whodathunkit?! Cauli mixes into a great mashed potato-like or even cheesy twice-baked potato-like food that even high-carb folks will love and often not even know the difference if you don’t tell them.

One of the most interesting things about the lowcarb food-world developments is that often, it is not so much that a given product is a “replacement” for high-carb (despite the ‘mock’ naming of many dishes), as that it is simply a new dish of its own, similar-to or usable-as things we know, but worth the spotlight as its own good stuff without comparison.

One thing I think the LC world really needs to focus on is re-naming a lot of their stuff to match what it IS and not what it was originally developed to replace the craved-taste-of. For example, “mock chicken fried rice” or “mock apple pie” should just be “chicken fried cauli” or “zucchini pie”. I dare anybody to taste the stuff and complain. As long as LCers make it seem like their food choices are just “fakes” of high-carb stuff, rather than awesome foods on their own, there is going to be some psychology in how folks perceive the options. It should just be different food. Which tastes great!

But thanks to a versatile breadish I tried today, right now my hero is FLAX SEED… flax meal… O let me adore thee, flax!

As so many people grow smaller, the profits for suppliers of low-carb ingredients grow larger. I bet the sudden interest from the low-carb (and diabetic) world has taken the flax growers and sellers by happy surprise. That new cash crop is probably like a genuine fairy tale for ‘em: finally, they’re spinning flax into gold!

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So it was 3am but I was wide awake, and two big boxes of lowcarb products were sitting in my living room, waiting to be unpacked into the Official Low Carb Wall Unit. As I was starting the project I was noting that I was actually kind of hungry, which is rare. I needed more protein, but I didn’t want more cheese and didn’t want to cook anything as I figured sleepiness would hit any moment.

Unwrapping Netrition’s excellent packaging (I rave because they only charge 5 bucks no matter what you buy, so it’s fair to be appreciative), which is kinda like lowcarb christmas only much more work getting to the goodies, I came upon two boxes of Atkins “Morning Start” bars. I bought these just to try them. They seemed to have fewer carbs than the other bar-versions and I thought well, maybe now and then I’ll need some protein quickly. I thought it might be nice to have stuff like that on hand for emergencies.

I decided right then would be a good time to try one. They were lower on protein and higher on carbs than I suspected, but frowning fiercely at it didn’t make that change, so I went ahead and started eating it. I admit, I couldn’t help thinking of the sheer quantity of food I would have been able to eat had I not been wasting carbs on this little thing about half the size/weight of a snickers.

The taste wasn’t bad. But then it hit me. SWEET!! Not just sugar-sweet or fruit-sweet or cream-sweet but specifically, “carb-food-sweet”. Must have been the granola in there. I felt as if I could feel ‘carb cravings’ starting in me literally as I ate the darn thing, as if it triggered something in me. I chalked it up to my imagination and sleep deprivation, finished it and finished the project, which took awhile, and went to bed.

This morning I woke up hungry. Cranky and hungry. I wanted chocolate; pastries sounded ideal; but mostly I just wanted food and a lot of it. Wanted to eat everything I even thought of.

Didn’t have time for a real breakfast before work, so I dragged out one of the many toys netrition brought me — Designer Whey chocolate peanut butter caramel protein powder (is that decadent or what?!) — and added some of Blue Diamond’s chocolate almond-milk-stuff with a tablespoon of DaVinci caramel and a splash of cream.

Eh. It was ok. I may never be truly fond of anything that contains protein powder, I think it is vile to the molecular level no matter what its brand disguise, but it was drinkable and I’m guessing most people would say they like it, given the endless waxing poetic I hear about protein shakes in all the lowcarb places online.

I was still hungry. Or maybe I was just driven to eat. I prowled the kitchen like I had food-lust and finally found a tiny bag of pecan halves I’d gotten at the store, and ate them. All of them. Then I continued prowling — and suddenly stopped and said, THAT DAMN BREAKFAST BAR!

In nine days I haven’t even been hungry, even despite not eating every other 24hrs! I have had zero cravings for anything. I have not even been tempted by carby food, not because I don’t like it but because I’ve had no appetite, I’m full of protein and water all the time.

Yet I eat one “lowcarb breakfast bar”, I actually feel the effects even while eating it, and within six hours I am foraging like an animal fearing starvation!

I should give the rest of them away.

{Bars claimed!}

I’ve been doing the IF (intermittant fasting) aspect of my plan since I began lowcarb induction on the 18th. Unlike some who’ve talked about their experiences with IF, I’m really not hungry during the fasting periods. Of course, I’m in the induction phase, which tends to kill appetite.

The problem is, I can’t seem to get the protein I need each day, or anything else for that matter. Since I’m only eating either the first or second half of the day, I have approximately half the food each day that I normally would. A little more the first half, as my change-point is 5pm.

Even without IF, the last time I did LC I found it difficult to eat enough protein in a day. I believe I’ve been chronically protein deficient for much of my life. I like meat, but it’s usually been something only eaten for-sure at dinner and even then in limited portions. Suddenly I’m eating lots of meat yet even with an added protein drink I can’t make even 100g per day let alone the 140 or so recommended for my body weight (which is at the highest end of the scale of PPLP’s recommended amounts).

4oz of a given meat averages 25g protein. This would suggest six meals a day each with a dose of meat. That is just not going to happen without a drastic schedule and food revamping. This is going to require that I adapt more shakes, or some homemade protein-bars, that much is clear. Still, even assuming I have mega protein at hand, on demand, who the bleep can ingest that much of it in half a day?! Hell it’s a major effort to ingest that much in a whole day!

I’m wondering if maybe the IF is not really appropriate for me at this time. NOT because of any quality of the IF itself, which I expect is just as beneficial as suggested by Dr. Eades. But because of being on induction, where perhaps the body chemistry is a little more unpredictable in terms of energy levels (my experience), it’s hard for me to know whether I’m weak because my blood sugar has dropped from not eating, or because that’s just some side effect of induction.

Mostly, because of being such a high body weight, where the immediate need to get sufficient protein in a day outweighs the longer-term benefit of IF. (Rather like Atkins not caring about his patients on inductions having fewer vegetables, as his primary concern was to get them to drop enough weight, they wouldn’t keel over long prior to having time to worry about their vitamin balance!) If I could appropriately arrange my food, IF would work fine, I’m just having trouble with it.

Perhaps some different arrangement of hours, giving me more ‘eating hours’ per day, would help. Or perhaps, a less than 24 hour period of fasting would help. I don’t know. My current IF ended 45 minutes ago; I just had a lovely dinner. But I am thinking of making this my last IF period, until I can get “the habit down” of sufficient protein per day even on a regular LC eating plan… get more familiar with the foods and possibilities so that kind of thing is a breeze.

Maybe new-induction is not an ideal time for IF, not because of anything about induction or IF, but because people just beginning the eating plan may not yet be as good at combining LC things to reach their daily nutritional goals.

OK. Until such time as I can be responsible enough to at least meet 80% of my protein goal most of the time on regular LC, I don’t think I should be doing IF, which (due to my own schedule, cooking and eating imperfections) seems to be resulting in me only getting 40-60% of my protein goal each day.

This is NO reflection on IF — I respect science, and I think the research seems strongly in support of the values of intermittant fasting. I would like to incorporate this into my eating plan at some point in the future, perhaps when I weigh less so my protein demands are lower, perhaps when I’m more experienced with LC so my ability to “flex my food to fit” nutritional demands is greater.

I feel a bit badly about it though, ’cause I wanted to do it long enough to give Dr. Eades feedback on its use during induction and by someone of my weight. Well, I guess that’s the thing about any kind of experiment — no matter what answer you get, it’s still an answer, for whatever it’s worth.

There was a debate thread on one of the forums recently that got me thinking about the issue of why people eat lowcarb to begin with.

There’s this guy, apparently a former football player who then gained some weight, lost about 50lbs on lowcarb (which for a guy, probably took all of 3 months if that, if LC was done right). Now he eats LC most the time and ‘whatever he wants’ one day a week.

That’s actually more moderate than most in his category. Most go back to high carb eating, and shift to LC once in awhile if they have gained more than 10 pounds. People like this, they don’t have any metabolic issue really. They got fat because they ate too much and often ceased previous activity (not unusual for people who are athletes in high school or college).

For them, lowcarb is hobby. Or as he put it, just a ‘tool’. There is no reason for them to make it an entire lifestyle. Why should they? They don’t need to.

Most the people on lowcarb that I know don’t do it for fun or a handy discipline. They do it because if they don’t do it, they will go diabetic or continue gaining weight, either of which lead to the “…or they will die” option.

Those are the people who tend to have massive carb cravings if they mess up their diet. They are the people who tend to have a much more difficult time staying on-plan as a result. They are the people who have to moderate their carbs because the side effects of not doing so are just too problematic.

They can usually have ‘treats’ — things higher than their normal carbs — sometimes without a big deal. But actual ‘cheats’ — a whole carbfest meal — will hurt.

One of the things most people don’t get about lowcarb is that the “one bite won’t hurt you” theory is wrong. On a calorie diet, it works that way. So you go over calories. That’s just a few less saved that day. Eat less the next day. Big deal. Don’t do it regularly if you want to lose weight.

If you go too far over carbs, it’s an entirely different story. The result is one of four things:
1. potentially nothing, usually if it’s not a big excess, and/or you’ve been doing this a long time so your body’s adapted, or you’re really seriously in ketosis so it’d take more than that to push you out. Do it regularly though and it’ll be one of the other options.
2. nothing happens to your ketogenic state but you start craving carbs within a couple of days, cravings so strong they are near the level of drug-addiction-withdrawals in intensity. The risk of going offplan jumps into the stratosphere during those times.
3. you literally knock yourself out of keto and you have to completely re-do induction… 1-3 weeks of ultra lowcarb, harder than the average period for most.
4. you stall, meaning you were losing weight consistently and suddenly that just stops happening and may take days or a week to see again. This one can happen in conjunction with any of the three above.

When a person treats carbs like calories, you can be sure they are lowcarbing for convenience, not “to save their life.” If it were different, you wouldn’t need to debate with them; they would aleady know, probably the hard way.

I got all snarky because when someone like that pops up on a thread where someone is saying, “Gosh, I so want to cheat and eat this 120 carbs treat!” (equivalent to 12 pieces of regular bread toast, or 4 candy bars), and someone who does LC as a hobby essentially tells them hey why the hell not, go for it, it’s not gonna hurt anything… well you know, that’s a bummer, ’cause it really might and if they weren’t looking for an excuse they wouldn’t have asked other people to justify it for them.

If you tell someone you’re going to the annual fair and gosh those funnel cakes call you, they’ll tell you that you gotta be strong. Yet often the same people will say it’s ok to blow it on thanksgiving or christmas. What’s the difference? They both only come once a year! It’s an example of the fact that most of lowcarb philosophy is a subjective mental state.

Atkins used to say, “One bite WILL hurt you.” You have to truly get OFF the sugars and stay off them. But for LC hobbyists, even one DAY doesn’t hurt them, maybe more. So they’re all for encouraging people to not only go ahead and ‘cheat’ — but hell, even PLAN cheating, because who can possibly just adapt a different eating plan forever, they say? Who could have the discipline to eat foods that are good for you — or at least, if they aren’t, are deliberately created to be fairly low carb — on an ongoing basis?

Hmmmn. Maybe people who be insanely fat or DIE if they don’t? Could be.

It’s tough because when some hobbyist lost some weight with LC they figure they’re now the expert on all things lowcarb I guess, because they are a success story. Which is great, more power to them. But that only makes them an expert on how to eat low carb for a few months to lose it, and how to eat it “as often as may be convenient for them” after that. It doesn’t necessarily make them an expert on the 1001 more detailed body chemistry issues that are behind why most people eat lowcarb.

The difference in effect on the body, on seriousness about the eating plan, on attitude toward high-carb food, and — most importantly — in consequence of violating the eating plan — is huge.

I guess I wish more people realized that.

Well as of today I am officially on a kinder but definitely less-gentle personal plan. I can’t believe I’m 41 years old and still waiting for … I don’t know what. Time to get off my duff and deal with some of the stuff I’m usually too busy, distracted, or in denial, to deal with.

I am ditching most my online stuff for about six weeks, aside from sessions now and then and occasionally blogging. I’ll be viewing and writing on the book instead.

And sleeping. Really, I am not making that part up.

Since my metabolism doesn’t respond to anything but lowcarb, and since after years of reading and two previous trials I think this is reasonable (then again, I’m also a libertarian–well not entirely, but close to it–and a lot of people wouldn’t find that very reasonable, either), I am going “back on the plan” as well.

Getting my husband to help me was worrisome. I implied seriously that he’d better help me or I was going to keel over any moment and then he’d have to get a job, and support the 10 year old into fashion and pricey videogames. I think he will help me just out of terror now. I was on LC when he arrived here a year ago, doing really well, but went off not long after; when someone wants to eat outside-food most the time, or wants to make stuff laden with carbs, it gets a lot harder to maintain your own space without a separate household.

I went on LC briefly years ago, my first time, and he suddenly had the urge to eat all MY food while I worked away from home, then to be making desserts when I arrived home (town of 900–no store open) so I either starved or blew the diet. I made him move back to Canada after that one. I figured he was trying to kill me, indirectly. I suspect he thinks I take these things too literally and have no sense of humor.

Dr. Michael Eades (one of my more favorite LC-related docs) has an interesting article on “intermittant fasting” (you gotta love any diet-related term with an acronym like “IF”), and aside from the beginning where he was being deliberately pollyannic, it’s pretty interesting, as it does seem a bit of a pain-free way of pulling fasting into the eating plan, getting the benefits of it, yet never despite 24/24 on/off fasting, never actually going a whole day without food. Read the article for more.

Caloric restriction is a terrific way to lose weight and get healthy; problem is, it’s not much fun. When rats live out their little ratty lives calorically restricted in their cages they seem to show signs of depression and irritability. Primates do for sure. If primates don’t get enough cholesterol, they can actually become violent. But, if you’re willing to put up with a little irritability, hostility and depression, it might be worth cutting your calories by 30 percent for the rest of your long, healthy miserable life.

He’s a lot more seriously into the Meat Thing than I am. I was a vegetarian for five years, not for health reasons but because I love animals so much. Mostly just screwed up my health bigtime. That is not the diet for someone who (a) doesn’t much like fruits and vegetables, and (b) has food sensitivities to gluten and other grainish things, and (c) seems a born carb/dairy addict. I once said that doing LC in today’s world was like trying to be Amish in New York city. It does seem easier nowdays though, with so much info available. Oh yeah: and I decided I’d buy that karmic (so to speak) responsibility, for the end of the animals. It’s mine either way. I just feel better about it now, and do anything I can to support organic, free range, etc. foods.

I have a bunch of groovy references I’ve been wanting to post for free stuff online, like image makers and such. Later. Gotta work.

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