Living Low Carb (73 page)

Clean Out Your Kitchen Cabinets and/or Your Refrigerator

Man, I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve had who have lost weight just by doing this one thing! I call it
bulletproofing your environment
. In fact, whenever I go up a few pounds and need to lose it, this trick has been my salvation. For many people, the attitude about food—at least in the beginning, before they’ve really adopted this new Way of Life—is this:
if it’s there, I’m gonna eat it
. Since a lot of our sabotage happens at night, when defenses are down (with television snacking or even midnight refrigerator raids), the best defense is a good offense. If it ain’t there, you can’t eat it. So get it out of there. That’s not to say you couldn’t get dressed, get in the car, go to the 24-hour convenience store, and buy some junk, but most of us won’t go that far, even for a carb or sugar fix. We
will,
however, go as far as the freezer. So dump the junk from your house and give yourself an advantage. If you live with other people and this isn’t really practical, try sectioning off parts of the fridge for your stuff and theirs, then think of the sections as truly separate. Pretend you’re living with roommates who will get mad if you eat their food.

Stop Watching Television (Okay, Okay, Then Cut Back)

I know it seems like heresy to suggest this, but study after study has linked increased television watching with expanding waistlines,
¹⁰
not to mention the development of childhood obesity.
¹¹
No one is quite sure exactly why, but it’s true nonetheless. Speculation has ranged from the obvious—more TV watching means less activity and more snacking—to the slightly more subtle (e.g., the number of overt cues to eat that come with the commercials). Even the esoteric has been postulated, like the idea that certain brain states induced by staring mindlessly at the tube might be linked to a general slowdown of the metabolism.
¹²
Whatever. The bottom line is: you watch more TV, you tend to be fatter. Try picking a few absolute favorites and then sticking with them. Watch them, enjoy them, then shut the TV off. And try turning it off when no one is watching it.

“Listening to Your Body”: Not Always a Good Idea

Face it: our bodies lie. They’re especially deceitful if we’ve been on the standard American diet for a long time. If we were living back in the caveman days, eating only the food that was available to us by hunting, fishing, or gathering, our bodies would tell us exactly what we needed. Our sweet tooth, for example, was originally a great survival mechanism. It caused us to seek out sweet-tasting plants, which were generally safe to eat, and fruits, which we needed because we humans do not make our own vitamin C. Now it causes us to roam the aisles of the 24-hour supermarket looking for cookies and ice cream. Our foolproof appetite regulators—such as cholecystokinin, the hormone that is released in the small intestine when our stomachs are full and we’ve had enough food—responds to protein and fat. It doesn’t recognize carbohydrate, which is why it is so easy to overeat carbs. So “listening to your body” may not always be such a great idea, as you can’t count on it to tell the truth, especially when you begin this new way of eating. Our bodies often tell us what we
want
, which is a conditioned response, and confuse us by making us believe that it’s what we
need
. They’re not necessarily the same thing. We need to reeducate our bodies to tell us the truth, and we do that the same way we teach our kids to be honest—by training them. Once our bodies have been reconditioned to respond to real food, we can begin trusting them to give us reliable signals.

Finally…

If You Fall Off the Wagon

Don’t let it be a big deal. Acknowledge that it happened, and just get back on, beginning with the very next meal.

CHAPTER 12

What We’ve
Learned about
Controlled-
Carbohydrate Eating:
Putting Together
Your Program

S
o, let’s talk about putting together the perfect low-carb diet.

The first step is to memorize the following:
there is no perfect diet
.

There’s also no perfect dress size—the one that’s perfect is the one that fits. If there’s one nugget of truth that we can hang our collective philosophical hats on, it’s the wisdom of the Romans:
De gustibus non disputandum est
, which means “Of taste, there is no disputing.” Translated to the area of weight loss and diet, it means quite simply this:
everybody’s different
. Each individual has his or her own emotional, psychological, and physical blueprint, as unique and special as fingerprints. No two people respond exactly the same way to anything—not to life, not to medicine, not to food, not to diet.

In interviewing dozens of people who have been low-carbing successfully for years, I was struck by the number of people who have done their own versions of programs discussed in this book, or who have come up with their own solutions, spins, and variations to make low-carbing work for them. Rick, for example, lost 50 pounds in 5 months by using the basic Atkins program, but deviated from Atkins orthodoxy by drinking a glass of red wine per day right from the beginning and never bothering to check for ketosis. Laurie lost 144 pounds and went from a size 26 to a size 8 not by following any specific plan but by eating “only low-carb food, exercising every day, and, for the last 25 pounds, lowering the fat in my diet.” Ari, who lost 50 pounds, did the Protein Power plan but monitored calories with an online diet tracker, making sure “not to go over 2,500 a day.” Leigh—40 pounds, 10 inches down and still counting—is a strict lacto-ovo vegetarian and lost her weight on a pretty unusual low-carb diet without meat. She attributes her success to completely cutting out sugar in all forms. Carl, an award-winning amateur figure skater from Alaska, has dropped 116 pounds by lowering his carbs to 50–80 grams a day—higher on days he has to train hard—and carefully monitoring calories, which he keeps to about 1,500 to 1,800 a day. And Annie, a low-carber from England, lost 50 pounds on the Atkins program but found that she had to
increase
her carbs to continue losing weight. When she reached her goal weight, she switched to the Schwarzbein Principle.

Many people begin with a strict version of one of the programs discussed in this book and then “graduate” to a more customized variation of their own making. That is a terrific way to go for many people. The original structure serves a purpose, like training wheels on a bike. For some others, a program “off the rack” is going to fit them just fine and they can follow the recommendations of the plan precisely and get great results. Some of us are lucky enough to be able to buy clothes off the rack with no alterations. For most, custom tailoring will be necessary.

One-size-fits-all diets are a thing of the past. In the not-so-distant future, we will probably be able to determine, through a kind of functional genetics, which patients are most likely to respond to which medicines and nutrients and, possibly through a metabolic typing, who does better on what kinds of foods. But for now, we have only the low-tech way, a kind of informed version of trial and error: if it works, great. If not, move on to something else.

Low-Carb Is Not a Religion

Don’t treat a low-carb lifestyle as a religion; it’s much better to think of it as a
strategy
. Like any strategy, you use it to achieve a goal, and you use it until it stops working. Your goal may be to lose 10 pounds or 100, and to maintain that goal weight forever. Or your goal may be to live a healthier, richer life, free of many of the risks from heart disease and diabetes that come with the standard American diet. In either case, or in
both
cases, you might find that you do much better on a more restricted plan, at least in the beginning. If that’s the strategy that works for you, great. If you have less weight to lose and are less metabolically resistant, you may find that you get great results with a plan that is a little less restricted from the beginning: more like the second, ongoing weight-loss phase of some of the three-phase plans (like Atkins, Protein Power, or Fat Flush). These plans allow anywhere between 40 and 90 grams of carbs per day. If you are already near your goal weight, don’t have any serious problems with sugar metabolism, and simply want to improve your health and maintain your weight, the Zone, or the third phase of one of the three-phase plans, might be the perfect place for you. Find what works for you, and do it. If it stops working, reassess.

Reassessment 101

Most people will lose weight on a low-carb program, whether it be on the restricted induction phase, the more lenient ongoing weight-loss phase, or a more general 50-gram-a-day starting plan. If you aren’t losing any weight, or if your weight loss has stalled for more than a few weeks, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

You may be stalled because you need to reduce carbs further (say, to 20 to 30 grams). In some cases, it may even be because your carbs are a bit too
low
—remember, everybody’s different! Equally likely is the possibility that your
calories
are too high, in which case you will need to begin measuring portions and keeping an eye on the amount of food you’re taking in. You may have some nutrient or mineral deficiencies that could be slowing metabolic processes; consider, at the very least, supplementing with a high-quality multivitamin, essential fatty acids, and magnesium, and go back and read
chapter 9
.

You may have sensitivities to some of the foods you are eating—a good game plan would then be to cut out all the usual suspects (especially wheat, dairy, and sugar) and see if the scale begins to move. Maybe you’re sensitive to some of the sugar alcohols found in those low-carb protein bars—they’ve been known to stall weight loss in some people. So has the citric acid in diet sodas. The point is to be willing to experiment, fine-tune, and tweak your program. And, in the words of Winston Churchill,
“Never give up!”

Choose Your Battles

When you first begin low-carbing, don’t allow yourself to be overwhelmed by too much information. It’s especially easy to get caught up in the small battles among low-carb diet theorists about things like coffee, artificial sweeteners, diet sodas, sugar alcohols, protein bars, cheese, wine, and other minor areas of disagreement. Don’t get sucked in. I’ve had clients who simply can’t imagine giving up coffee; I tell them not to give it up. Same with diet sodas, wine, or even raspberry mocha–flavored coffee creamers! The important thing to remember is that you are trying to make changes on a
continuum
. The name of the game is
direction
, not
perfection
. If all that’s standing between you and a more healthful low-carb diet is a couple of diet colas, keep the colas for now—maybe you’ll give them up later (or maybe you won’t). Learn to choose your battles. You don’t have to do everything all at once.

Invest Time in the Kitchen

In 1970, we spent $6 billion on fast food. In the year 2000, we spent
$110 billion
—virtually 150% of the entire California budget deficit. Fully 90% of the money spent on food in this country is spent on
processed
food. The typical American eats three fast-food burgers and four orders of fries
per week
. “We are,” says Dr. Joe Mercola, “exchanging our health for convenience.”

It’s time to stop. Spend a little time in the kitchen. Prepare your own food. Make your own snacks. Cook your own breakfast. Begin to look at food as a
prescription drug.
As one Zone dieter on the Internet said, “Treating food in this new way is definitely a challenge and a learning experience—but it certainly beats my old way of eating that left me fat, tired, and depressed.”

Junk Is Junk, High-Carb or Low-Carb

Americans’ taste for simple solutions and a food industry more than willing to accommodate them could easily result in the following scenario: a vast, overweight population of “low-carbers” with swelling waistlines and skyrocketing health problems. A typical specimen of this committed “low-carber” strolls through Disneyland, one hand grasping a vat-size cup of sugar-free soda, the other holding any of a zillion “carbohydrate-free” snack foods yet to be invented—hot dogs on low-carb buns, low-carb
cotton candy
, low-carb candy bars, low-carb
popcorn
. You get the picture. And it’s not pretty.

Cutting carbs is not enough. We have to cut the
junk
. We have to learn, unfortunately, that in most cases the food industry is not our friend. If “carb-free” becomes just another slogan like “low-fat” did and we become a nation addicted to carb-free, high-calorie, chemically enhanced junk food, we will have traded one idiotic notion for another, and our health will be in the same bad shape it was before.

This brings us to the question on the table: how
should
we proceed? What general principles can we extract from the collective wisdom of the diet authors discussed in this book and from the principles of controlled-carbohydrate eating that all subscribe to in one fashion or another? How can you put together a program that works for
your
life, that will allow
you
to lose weight, and that will promote and optimize
your
health for years to come?

Glad you asked.

Ten Simple Principles for a Successful Low-Carb Life