Low-Carb Lifestyle

Weight History

Excellent Doctor Report

First, let me give you some background. Before the holiday season of 2006 began, I made the unfortunate decision to go OFF my low-carb diet. I ate "regular" foods like bread, cereal, and milk. I ate cornbread dressing, mashed potatoes, peas, and rolls with my Thanksgiving turkey. And yes, I ate some sweets like Christmas cookies. As a result, I gained back all of the weight I had lost plus more! Also, my cholesterol went back up. How foolish I had been!

In February 2007, right after Valentine's Day, I made the decision to go BACK ON my low-carb diet. Since then, I have lost more than twenty pounds, and I got this EXCELLENT report from my doctor.

  Lipid Panel Results, November 13, 2007

Summary...

• Sugar: normal
• Liver Function: normal
• Cholesterol: 153 (down from 187)
• Triglycerides: 127
• Good Cholesterol: "on the low side"
• Bad Cholesterol: 105 (well within normal range)
• Overall: "very good"

What Do I Eat?

Breakfast

• 3-6 eggs: poached, scrambled, fried floating in bacon grease, or prepared as an Western Omlet with lots of cheese
• a half-pound of bacon or four sausage patties
• water or sugar-free Tang or similar drink

Lunch

If I want to eat light, I will eat a low-carb wrap consisting of a low-carb tortilla, lunch meat (usually chicken), lettuce, and Kraft real mayonaisse. Stay away from low-fat mayo, because it is pumped full of sugar.

If there is leftover hamburger, bell peppers, and onions, I'll open a jar of "Pizza Quick" sauce (any low-carb variety) and a can of mushrooms, spead generously on a low-carb tortilla, and bake it for ten minutes to make a personal pizza.

Dinner

For side items, I usually steam broccoli or cauliflower. I make a mashed cauliflower that resembles mashed potatoes: just stir in lots of butter, sour cream, and also heavy whipping cream to make it firm, and salt to taste. I also fry cabbage in my wok...it tastes really good if you use lots of Chinese oil, but canola oil works good too, and season with garlic, oregano, and Mrs. Dash seasoning. If I eat green beans, I am a Southerner, so I cook them for hours on the stove with added bacon grease or strips of bacon, plus lots of pepper.

Dessert

Sugar-free Jell-O is also very good. Top with cool whip and chopped peanuts.

If I am in the mood for some chocolate milk, my favorite is Soy Slender sugar-free soy milk (sweetened with Splenda) from the Westsoy company. This product also comes in vanilla flavor: I generally like vanilla, but its too potent in the soy milk. There is also a cappuchino flavor soy milk that I haven't tried because I'm not a coffee drinker.

Snacks

The Science of Low-Carb

"David, in my practice I see a lot of the local farmers. Some raise cattle. When they want to fatten up their cows for slaughter, they don't feed them bowls of fat. They give their cows grain. Grain is how to beef up the cattle."

In science class in elementary school, I was taught about the food chain. There are producers (plants) and consumers (animals). The producers get their energy from the sun and store the energy in the form of carbohydrates, or sugars. Consumers get their energy from plants and use it up. If the animals get excess energy from their food, they store it up in the form of fat.

If you eat lots of grains and high-carbohydrate vegtables like corn and peas, you will be getting more energy from your food than you can possibly use, and YOUR body will store it in the form of fat. On the other hand, if you eat animal products, you only get a little bit of energy from the sun that is "leftover" that the animal did not use. Your body gets barely enough energy to run on, and so you don't store fat. You have to burn fat in order to make up for the energy that you don't get from your food.

Here is an interesting truth. HUNGER HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH AN EMPTY STOMACH, AND FEELING "FULL" HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HOW MUCH FOOD YOU HAVE IN YOUR STOMACH! Your feeling of hunger or being full has to do with the amount of sugar in your bloodstream. I came to know this fact from personal experience. When I was a teenager, I had an appendectomy the old-fashioned way, and I have the long scar to prove it. I was in the hospital for a week, and I didn't eat until about the fifth or sixth day. For the first four days, I had an IV in my arm, and there was a little drip of sugar (glucose) on the stand beside my bed. As long as that sugar was dripping, I felt no hunger whatsoever. As soon as they disconnected me, I felt hunger.

I've heard little saying like, "You'll lose weight if you take a bite of an apple fifteen minutes before you sit down for a meal." This is true, but why? Because that bite of an apple becomes sugar in your bloodstream in fifteen minutes, and you'll feel full, so you won't eat as much at the dinner table.

Sugar works just like a narcotic. When you eat it, you get a spike of sugar in your blood, and that is just like getting a "high" from drugs. You burn that sugar off, and then you experience a "crash", just like a drug addict expereiences when they haven't had drugs for a while. Then, just like there is an intense urge for the drug addict to get more drugs, a person on a sugar crash gets an intense hunger and wants to eat. When I am not low-carb dieting, I have even gotten the "shakes" when I became so weak that I couldn't hardly walk...I felt faint! Also, just like the effect of a dangerous drug, the more sugar you get, the more you want, and the more concentrated you need the sugar to be in order to get the same satisfaction. A drug addict will eventually feel no buzz at all from marijuana and will need something stronger like crack cocaine. A sugar addict might start out eating just a small piece of chocolate or a cup-cake in the beginning, and the next thing you know you want to eat not only oneonce in a while. Before you know it, that person can't get by eating one piece of pie, they want to eat the ENTIRE pie!

When you're on a low-carb diet, you almost never feel hunger. Sometimes I forget to eat breakfast. I forget to eat lunch. About 2:00 or 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon, I'll start to feel a little bit hungry, and a spoonful of peanut butter is usually all it takes to get me through to supper time. That's because I'm burning internally-stored fat at a steady pace. My blood sugar is not going up-and-down like a roller-coaster. It doesn't matter that my stomach is empty, I'm not hungry because I'm have all of the fuel I need floating around in my bloodstream.

The most important thing to remember about low-carb dieting is that YOU CAN'T CHEAT. Even if you cheat just a little bit, it screws up your steady stream of blood sugar for days.

Change Your Thinking at Meal Time

Consider a meal consisting of the following:

• Crispy fried chicken
• Mashed potatoes with gravy
• Baked beans with bacon
• Roll with butter
• Salad with buttermilk dressing

1. "Chicken is good as long as you remove the skin and bake it."
   WRONG! The skin on the chicken is not the problem. Frying it is not the problem. The problem is that to make it crispy, the chicken was rolled in some flour before it was fried. The flour is loaded with carbohydrates. The healthy thing to do would be to fry the chicken without the breading. I recommend deep-frying. Now, if you deep-fry a chicken breast with the skin taken off, it will turn to leather before it's cooked all the way through. I recommend eating deep-fried chicken wings instead. Wings are the part of the chicken that has the most skin on it. Don't bread the wings in anything, just put them down in the hot oil for about ten minutes. They will fry up perfect every time, naturally crispy and delicious. After they are finished cooking, use a paint brush to spread on your favorite low-carb sauce, like Hooters-brand sauce from the supermarket.

2. "Mashed potatoes with gravy is bad because the gravy is made with grease."
   WRONG! If the gravy is bad for you, it is because of the flour that is in it. You can find cans of gravy in the supermarket that are low-carb. Usually this is the white breakfast gravy made with sausage. However, beware because there are many varieties of canned gravy that have a lot of flour in them. Read the label! Now, the mashed potatoes are bad because they too have tons of carbohydrates in them. I recommend that you substitute the potatoes for creamy mashed cauliflower.

3. "Beans are a protien-packed excellent substitute for meat. Leave out the bacon and you'll be fine."
   WRONG! The only beans I have found that don't contain a lot of carbohydrates are soy beans. Light firm tofu is pretty good as an ingredient in home-made hot-and-sour soup (commonly served in Chinese restaurants). I recently discovered soy milk is an excellent drink. Baked beans are particularly bad because they contain a lot of brown sugar, and that's about as many carbohydrates as you can serve yourself. Hey, I love to eat pinto beans, white beans, etc., but they are just too high in carbohydrates, so I don't eat them anymore. Avoid the beans, but feel free to eat the bacon!

4. "Whole-wheat rolls are an excellent source of fiber, just avoid the butter. Fat-free margerine is a better choice."
   WRONG! Margerine contains hydrogenated oil, and that's very bad for you. Butter is the clear winner, hands down, as natural as cows. I wouldn't dispute that a roll contains fiber, but my goodness! Is it worth spiking your sugar level? Avoid bread, especially the whole-wheat bread since that has the highest concentration of carbohydrates. If you must eat bread, look for one that contains less than ten total carbohydrates per slice with at least five grams of fiber. That's a net carbohydrate count of 5 grams, which isn't bad. Eat only one slice. Put butter on it.

5. "Salad is good for you, but eat no dressing at all or use a fat-free dressing."
   WRONG! Fat-free dressing is loaded with sugar. When manufacturers take the fat out of dressing, it tastes awful, so they must put something else in it to make it edible again. What do they use? Sugar, and lots of it! Throw away any fat-free dressing in your refrigerator and get the real stuff! There are many varieties of buttermilk-based dressing that contain one or two grams of carbohydrates per serving, but if you look long and hard, you can find some that contains zero grams. Some manufacturers who are carb-conscious have even made varieties of low-carb French and Italian dressings. Also, scrutinize your salad! Does it contain croutons? Pick them out! How about carrots? Throw them away! Pea pods or loose peas? Fling them into the trash can with your spoon (it's fun!). Lettuce or spinach leaves, onions, tomatoes, bell peppers, black olives, green olives, mushrooms, miniature corn cobs, dill pickles, cottege cheese (not low-fat), cheese, and your favorite low-carb dressing combine to create the most scrumtious salad! Eat hearty!

Recipes

Low-Carb_Pumpkin_Pie.pdf (26Kb)