Living Low Carb (70 page)

Eat Breakfast Every Day

When you skip breakfast, among the many other negative things that happen is that insulin release is greater at the next meal than it would otherwise have been. Blood sugar is destabilized. You’re more likely to be subject to cravings. In all likelihood, you’re running on empty and masking it with coffee. If you’re one of those people who has no appetite in the morning, it’s probably because you’ve conditioned yourself to this unnatural way of eating. A good place to start with the rehabilitation of your appetite is with a protein shake. Even people who are not hungry in the morning can get one of these babies down, especially if it’s delicious and made with good extras like berries or a tablespoon of peanut butter. Eventually, you should transition to a real-food breakfast (at least for most days), and make sure it contains protein and some good fats.

If you need some additional motivation: at least seven studies have found a correlation between being overweight and skipping breakfast.
¹

Memorize This: Water Retention Can Mask Fat Loss!

This is one of those paradoxical situations that don’t make sense on the surface—the less water you drink, the more water you retain. Why? Because when not enough water is coming into the body, a hormone called vasopressin acts on the kidneys to tell them to reabsorb the existing water in the body rather than urinating it; another hormone, aldosterone, tells the body to conserve sodium, leading to more water retention. Other factors—such as medications, hormones, menstrual cycles, and birth-control pills—can also affect water retention. So sometimes your body is actually dropping fat, but because you’re holding on to water, you might not notice it on the scale. Once again, the best advice is to keep drinking water.

Shop for Color

I read the women’s magazines all the time so I can stay up to date on the kind of nutrition information being disseminated (I read the men’s magazines too—but only, of course, for the articles). One of the very best tips I ever read was this one: shop for color. If you don’t want to memorize a whole bunch of antioxidants and proanthocyanidins and phytochemicals, the easiest way to ensure you’re getting the best nutritional bang for your money is to look at what the contents of your cart look like on the checkout counter. Does it resemble one of those great postcard pictures of a European outdoor market? It should be overflowing in greens, reds, oranges, and even blues. All those colorings in fruits and vegetables are there because they are natural antioxidants that will serve a similar purpose in your body. If everything you buy is the color of cardboard, you’re doing something wrong.

Shop the Outside Aisles

Want to magically reduce the number of calories you’re eating from sugar, processed foods, and junk carbohydrates? Here’s a simple trick: step away from the inner aisles of the supermarket. All the good stuff is on the outside. Spend your time in the periphery of the supermarket. (It also seems to be the secret to a good singles pickup; after all, no one ever turned to a stranger to ask, “How do you tell if this cereal box is fresh?”)

Carry Protein-Rich Snack Food with You

Forget the vending machines, the airport kiosks, and the 7-Eleven stores. Start thinking of snack food in terms of real food, and start thinking of real food in terms of
protein
(and fat)—just what your hunting and gathering ancestors would most likely have been munching on while taking a break from stalking wild game. Think nuts, cheese (string cheese is a great choice), hard-boiled eggs, jerky, or some leftover chicken in a plastic bag. You can occasionally add a piece of fruit to the mix if your particular plan permits it, but what you
can’t
do is grab a bag of chips or pretzels or a chocolate chip cookie—not if you want to get or stay slim!

Buy Some Cookbooks

If I had a mere nickel for every client who asked me “What can I eat?” or who complained of being bored with the same old choices, I would be one very rich nutritionist! The answer to the question became abundantly clear to me while researching this book. There are dozens—I mean
dozens
—of amazing cookbooks and recipes out there for virtually every level of ability and interest in cooking, from complete novice (me) to gourmet chef. (Look at some of the marvelous suggestions for meats and snacks from Internet chef superstar Karen Barnaby on page 337, or visit
http://www.lowcarb.ca
; and those are only the beginning!) The best of the cookbooks are listed in Resources, and there are more coming out every month. In addition, the Web sites (see Resources) that I list nearly all have recipe sections, some of them incredibly diverse and interesting. There’s a
lot
more to low-carb eating than just chicken and vegetables.

S
TARBUCKS
G
OES
“L
OW
-C
ARB
”

In an example of low-carb going mainstream without much fanfare, Starbucks—which previously offered only extremely high-calorie, highcarb products—now offers a number of food items suitable for lowcarbers, including nuts, cheese, and fruit.

My personal favorite is the high-protein snack plate to go, which is just about the best “mini-meal” I’ve seen in a large chain store. It beats just about any snack I’ve seen around, and I sometimes “recreate” it using my own ingredients when I want a high-protein meal of fewer than 300 calories.

The Starbucks “High Protein” meal-to-go consists of a whole egg, some grapes, some cheese, and a mini whole-grain bagel and peanut butter. Total calories: 260, with 13 grams of protein, 4 grams of fiber, and 9 grams of fat.

Now that’s a healthful “fast-food” option!

Don’t Do Anything Else While You’re Eating

You’re trying to bring mindfulness and consciousness to the table when it comes to eating, so that you can reduce some of the automatic eating that takes place when you’re thinking about other things. A good way to do that is to make eating time
eating time
, not reading-the-paper time or watching-television time. The more you can do this, the better, and the less likely you are to consume food while you barely notice you’re consuming it!

Eat Slowly, and Savor Every Bite

Here’s another tip you can file under “Grandmother knew best.” The fact is that chewing your food slowly and thoroughly, putting your fork down between bites, and actually
enjoying
what you’re eating can help you lose weight. Here’s why. The brain doesn’t really get the message “Hey, he’s full!” from the stomach until about twenty minutes after you’ve eaten enough. That’s how long it takes for the hormone CCK to do its job and signal “Enough!” to the brain. So fast eaters frequently overeat before their brain gets the signal that they’re not really hungry any more. You can go a long way toward enhancing natural appetite control by taking advantage of your body’s excellent communication network, but you need to give it enough time to work! Also, eating slowly and actually
experiencing
your food works against the kind of unconscious, mindless eating that caused you to put on weight in the first place.

Eat the Bulk of Your Food Earlier in the Day

Adelle Davis used to say, “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.” She was right. One important study showed that when people were fed a 2,000-calorie meal for breakfast (and nothing else during the day), they lost weight, but when they were fed the exact same meal at night, they gained.
²
Spread your food out during the day to control your blood-sugar and insulin levels, but try not to eat too much in the evening.

Add Yogurt or Kefir to Your Daily Program

Cultured milk products restore healthful bacteria to your body and are usually well tolerated even by people who have problems with dairy. You need to eat the
plain yogurt
with the
real live cultures
(not the junk food with the tons of fruit on the bottom). Even better, use kefir. Here’s the deal with the carb content: it’s not as high as the package says. In fact, for ½ cup of yogurt, kefir, or buttermilk, you need to count only 2 grams of effective carbohydrate!

How can this be? It’s because of the way the government measures carbs. They measure everything in the food—water, ash, protein, fat—and then assume that what’s left is carbohydrate. This works fine for almost everything, including milk, but it doesn’t work for
fermented
milk products. As Dr. Jack Goldberg of GO-Diet fame points out, when you ferment milk, you inoculate it with lactic-acid bacteria, which then “eats up” almost all the milk sugar (lactose) and converts it into lactic acid, the stuff that curds the milk and gives the product its unique taste. So the milk
sugar
that the government thinks is left in the product is really just about gone—it’s been “converted” in the fermenting process by the lactic-acid bacteria. The “real” amount of carbohydrate left in ½ cup of plain yogurt or kefir is only 2 grams—this has been measured by Goldberg in his own lab. I recommend that you get the full-fat variety of kefir or yogurt and enjoy it on an almost daily basis.

Repeat After Me: Fruit Juice Is Not—and Never Was—a Health Food

One of the many triumphs of marketing by the giant food conglomerates was convincing America that fruit juice is good for you. There are ads that proclaim proudly that some stupid sugar-laden soft drink is actually 10% real fruit juice. Fruit juice is
not
fruit (and for carb addicts, even fruit itself has to be watched, at least in the beginning). Fruit juice is, plain and simple, junk food. It’s loaded with sugar, it has none of the fiber of real fruit, it has a high glycemic load, and it contributes absolutely nothing of value to your diet except for a few measly vitamins that you can easily get elsewhere.

Eat Protein at Every Meal

Every single meal
should have protein in it. Ideally, so should every snack (but see “Choose Your Battles” on page 369). Protein has less of an effect on insulin than carbs do, is more satisfying,
³
and requires more energy (calories) to break down and assimilate. The body recognizes protein (and fat) as something you have a need for; therefore, the appetite-control mechanisms that send messages from your gut to your brain signaling that you’ve had enough food work well with protein (something they do not do with carbohydrates, as we saw in
chapter 2
). A greater ratio of protein to carbohydrate at a meal stabilizes blood sugar and reduces insulin response.
⁴
And new research suggests that leucine, an amino acid found in protein, specifically helps you to maintain muscle mass while losing body fat during weight loss.
⁵

W
EB
MD R
ECOMMENDS
S
TEAK
?

In what has to be considered the ultimate “turnaround,” the ultraconservative WebMD recently published an article called “Bad Foods that Are Good for Weight Loss.”
^*
Eggs and steak were at the top of the list.

Just remember that while both foods are indeed great for weight loss, commercial meat may not be so great for your health. Get the weightloss benefits of protein by choosing grass-fed meat and cage-free eggs!

^*
http://www.webmd.com/diet/slideshow-bad-foods-that-are-good-for-weight-loss

“All-Natural” Doesn’t Mean All-Good

Another triumph of the marketers was convincing us that “natural” on a food label actually
means
something. The term
all-natural
is a wholly unregulated, utterly meaningless term. Anyone can use it on anything. What’s all-natural about frozen dinners, “energy” bars, or even cut-up chicken parts in the meat section of your supermarket? You mean they were “naturally” fed a diet they normally wouldn’t eat, fed “natural” antibiotics, and then all by themselves just “naturally” morphed into chicken parts in little yellow “all-natural” Styrofoam containers? Forget the term
natural.
Toxic mushrooms are all-natural, and so is crude oil, but we don’t eat those. Look for
real food
, preferably without a bar code. Think about what you could have hunted, fished for, gathered, plucked, or grown if you were with your original ancestors on the savanna.
That’s
natural food. Eat it.

Replace Grains with Greens

There are lots of reasons why grains may not be the most healthful food in the world for most people. According to Dr. Joseph Mercola, grains contain little vitamin C and no vitamin A, and two of the major B-vitamin deficiency diseases are almost exclusively associated with excessive grain consumption.
⁶
Fiber—with very few exceptions—is present in paltry amounts in most processed grain products like cereals and breads and, in any case, can be gotten from vegetables and other sources. Though some people do okay with grains, if you’ve got a weight problem, you are probably not one of them. Get your carbohydrates from vegetables, at least most of the time. C. Leigh Broadhurst, PhD, author of
Diabetes: Prevention and Cure,
once told me that if she could have her overweight and diabetic clients make only a single change, the one that would have the most impact on their lives would be to remove wheat from their diets. Think about it.