Tuesday, January 28, 2014

IN WHICH I AWAKEN FROM A LONG SLEEP TO TELL ABOUT MY LOW-CARB DIET


Well, friends, it’s been a long time since my last posting.  In the meantime, though, I haven’t been idle.  No, no.  My time has been spent trying different diets.  




One thing I’ve come to believe:  no single diet works for everyone.  Although for a number of reasons (mostly relating to animal welfare) I’d dearly like to go vegan as I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve found my body doesn’t do well on it.  I can’t handle all the carbs that a vegan diet emphasizes.   Especially oodles of fruit.  Because when it comes right down to it, isn’t fruit pretty much just sugar with fancy-colored skin?

In the last time period, I’ve been following (roughly), the Atkins diet using the book, New Atkins for a New You by Westman, Phinney and Volek.   What does this mean in terms of what I eat most days?  Meat, poultry, fish, cheese and yogurt, nuts and a bit of berries.  I try to avoid all grains (yes, popcorn, we’re talking about you!), beans, and most types of fruit.  Using this diet I’ve been on a roll, losing 2 pounds a week.  And I don’t feel that hungry – yay!

New Atkins meets my criteria for a good diet book:  easy to understand, well organized, and it includes studies giving the scientific basis for the points made in the book.  I highly recommend it for anyone wanting an entry into the World of Low-Carb eating.

After all, there is apparently no metabolic requirement for carbohydrates.  The human body requires certain essential fats (fatty acids) and proteins, but NO CARBS.  What would you conclude from that except maybe we should keep the carbs at a minimum?

The Atkins book includes some recipes, and there are many low-carb cookbooks on the market now to help you feed yourself with tasty fare.  My bitch about the cookbooks is only….I HATE TO COOK.  So, my friends, what good is a book entirely filled with recipes to me?   Although I love to eat gourmet cooking, my aversion to cooking means that most of the time, I have become content to eat the same thing every day, and the dishes can be very simple, i.e. some grilled chicken from Trader Joe’s slathered with mayo and garlic powder over romaine.  Yogurt with walnuts and berries, right?  Yum.

The result of my dietary quirks is that I have had to accumulate low-carb recipes that:  1) don’t require much time standing at a hot stove; 2) don’t require scads of ingredients; 3) don’t EVER require using a food processor (have you tried to clean one of those things?  You have to take it apart!); 4) are for desserts.  I figure, if you’re going to go to all the trouble of actually putting together food from a recipe while standing in the kitchen YOU BETTER END UP WITH SOMETHING DECADENT LIKE A DESSERT.  



I don’t want you to suffer, so in future posts I will share some of these recipes in case there are other Kitchen Slackers like me who feel that being lazy shouldn’t affect whether or not you get dessert.