To get to the answer to the question straight away: it might.

This was brought up in a study reported on Msnbc.com, part of which states:

…new research has determined that a judgmental attitude may just go hand in hand with exposure to organic foods. In fact, a new study published this week in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, has found that organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks.

“There’s a line of research showing that when people can pat themselves on the back for their moral behavior, they can become self-righteous,” says author Kendall Eskine, assistant professor of the department of psychological sciences at Loyola University in New Orleans [ed: also known as 'Captain Obvious' by his friends]. “I’ve noticed a lot of organic foods are marketed with moral terminology, like Honest Tea, and wondered if you exposed people to organic food, if it would make them pat themselves on the back for their moral and environmental choices. I wondered if they would be more altruistic or not.”

You can see where this is going. They administered tests to a number of people that sounds kind of arbitrary to me (go read it yourself if you’re interested) and concluded:

“There’s something about being exposed to organic food that made them feel better about themselves,” says Eskine. “And that made them kind of jerks a little bit, I guess.”

Why does eating better make us act worse? Eskine says it probably has to do with what he calls “moral licensing.”

“People may feel like they’ve done their good deed,” he says. “That they have permission, or license, to act unethically later on. It’s like when you go to the gym and run a few miles and you feel good about yourself, so you eat a candy bar.”

It think our researcher here is right – and wrong.

I like this notion of ‘moral licensing’, but it doesn’t just occur in people who eat organic food.

An asshole is created any time a person’s behavior or circumstance permit them to fall victim to the delusion that they are better than someone else, or are somehow qualified to be a moral ‘decider’ for others.

It’s easy to see how eating organic, with its high cost and the sheer amount of trouble involved, would engender in people the desire for a greater payback than the quality of the food they by. Self-righteousness comes free with every organic product – if you choose to take it.

By extension, ANY DIET can come with a dose of self-righteousness that can be applied to people on diets that differ, or people who don’t diet at all.

I’m going to hit the local farmer’s market this morning and see what my farmers got growing. I’ll pass on the self-righteousness.

Of course, the problem with being an asshole is not knowing you’re being one. It happens all the time. That’s why I invite anyone who reads my blog to point out any ‘pot calling the kettle black’ behavior on my part.

Lastly, I love the response one person has to this self-righteousness in others as reported in the article:

“At my local grocery, I sometimes catch organic eyes gazing into my grocery cart and scowling,” says Sue Frause, a 61-year-old freelance writer/photographer from Whidbey Island. “So I’ll often toss in really bad foods just to get them even more riled up.”

I think I’m going to stop eating avocados as it seems they make me hungry. Though low carb and good for you, they might be one of those foods that I have an idiosyncratic response to.

I got the blood work back from the endocrinologist. Nothing worrisome enough to treat. Testosterone 614. A1C ‘slightly elevated’ at 5.9, fasting blood glucose 110. No mention of thyroid at all, so I suppose that nothing is wrong there either – I’m expecting the actual results in the mail this week and will review it for more detail.

Getting into ketosis was another big milestone – only took me 3 months…I do indeed suck at low carb – it’s just that I am persistent.

For the coming week I’d like to focus on:

• Continuing the exercise thing. Don’t get any more ambitious than I currently am. If I do this week exactly what I did last week, I’ve hit a home run. It’s not how many reps, on what machine, and at what weight that matters – it’s instilling a habit that becomes an unconscious part of my life that’s most important.
• Stay in ketosis. This can be tricky because the keto sticks don’t always measure ketones accurately, and sometimes too much protein can allow your body to produce enough glucose to thwart ketosis. Really, the focus is not on measurement as much as following a course of healthy low carb eating.
• Continue the calorie-counting. As much as I loathe calorie-counting and believe that it is part of a diabolical plan to make us eat processed food (explained in this post), I still feel that it a great guide to monitoring intake for a short period of time to allow one to get a better feel of what portion control looks like. Once you internalize what adequate portions are, you can drop the calorie-counting like a hot potato.
• Once again, bring my focus back to what ‘healthy eating’ is. The Atkins shakes have helped me as they do indeed satisfy my appetite and keep me feeling full and content way beyond the calories contained in them. I just don’t want to live my life dependent on processed foods. Being pragmatic, however, I don’t need to adhere to all-or-nothing thinking, and keeping these to one-a-day isn’t a big deal in the larger scheme of things if it helps me get to my target weight of 185.

Sunday, March 11, 2012 – 203.4

After my morning infusion of coffee, I had an Atkins shake at about 9:30, followed by a few leftover pepperoni from the pizza the other day. I had some kimchi, the Korean pickled vegetables about mid afternoon. I worked around the house, and exercised, and had a yogurt. I also had some roast beef wrapped in babybel cheese and then pork rinds with salsa.  I also drank a lot of water. Whenever I have this unusual thirst, I know the scale will be unkind. Something was amiss. I was a bit hyper, energetic – almost manic. Not in a bad way – just not my usual self, though.

About 5pm the bell rang and our neighbor’s son had sent over a tray of home-baked cupcakes for my daughter (they’re both 5).

I had one without thinking (Diet? What diet?) – and it was off to the races. I recall some Lindt chocolate, a slice of bread with butter and lots of port rinds with salsa.

As is usual when I do this now – I felt sick afterward. Not guilt or some emotional thing – just sick like I wanted to puke. I went to bed early. Oh boy, what’s the scale going to say tomorrow?

Total calories for the day (rough estimate): 2327. Fat: 165g, Net carbs: 92g, Protein: 117g (63/17/20%)

Monday, March 12, 2012 – 205.6

Progress! Last week’s blowout made me gain 7 pounds – this one only 2.2. Really, in the total scheme of things, one day out of the past 7, with calories still relatively low, this transgression isn’t all that much. Scale’s not happy, but I’ll recover. In general, I’m still going in the right direction. Weekends are always tough.

I awoke with numbness in my right arm this morning – notable only because this used to be a daily occurrence for me when I was fat – now it happens so rarely that it strikes me as worth noting here. Did the carbs last night have something to do with it? I have no clue.

The wife had made brisket the night before, and we also had some leftover zucchini with ham cooked in butter. I brought that for lunch and guesstimated the nutrition info. I had the shake at noon and the leftovers mid afternoon, and that left me satisfied for the day. Stopped to exercise on the way home, and cooked in the evening with the wife and kid. Hungry, I picked on stuff while they cooked – a bit of pork rinds with salsa, some kimchi, some of the sausage from the leftover soup, a can of tuna with mayo.

The wife and kid ate trout and zucchini – I was at my caloric max by then.

Total calories for the day: 1617.  Fat: 123g, Net carbs: 9g, Protein: 110g (69/4/28%)

Tuesday, March 13, 2012 – 204.0

Had a mean case of the hungries and the grumpies today. Had 2 shakes for breakfast – the first one didn’t seem to do anything. I even thought of stopping for a deli sandwich on the way in to work – I haven’t thought that in a while.

I resisted, though I did have a yogurt and 4 ounces of beef and half a stick of butter by 1pm. I had such a grump on I walked around the office building three times. I find myself looking to exercise (the pathetic amount I do) as medicine now. It helped a bit, but I still had work itself to get me all ornery again.

Came home, stopped to exercise, and it seemed tougher than yesterday. When I got home I wasn’t necessarily hungry as much as thirsty, so I grabbed a bottle of water – but before I did I tested for ketones and weighed myself. The keto stick was dark red and the weight was 202.2.

It was a perfect night for an Atkins shake and bed, as I was in no mood for anything – but my daughter felt sick, and I went to the kitchen to get her something…and all Hell broke loose. It was unconscious eating – 1/2 McDonald’s Hamburger, a leftover bit of bagel with cream cheese, then a pile of cream cheese on a piece of bread. Not satisfied – or a case of WTF setting in, I had maybe 6 lindt chocolates, 2 kit kats, and maybe 1/2 dozen of these thin almond cookies.

Now, as the LoseIt! app scans bar codes, it makes it easy to quantify this blowout.

Total calories for the day: 2450.  Fat: 158g, Net carbs: 120g, Protein: 100g (60/23/17%)

Wednesday, March 14, 2012 – 202.6

I’ve seen this happen before. Curious, isn’t it? The ‘eat candy and lose weight’ diet. While I’m happy the scale went down, I’m not trying to perfect the candy diet and I don’t believe candy is all that healthy for you – I just still can’t reckon having a relatively high-calorie, high-carb day (including candy) – and losing weight. Perhaps everyone is wrong about what brings about weight loss? Or maybe just a little statistical ‘blip’ that mean nothing. Tough to quantify when you’re an experiment of one – and a bad subject to boot.

The day actually didn’t turn out bad, I returned to my regular grumpy self (as opposed to extra-grumpy) at work, wasn’t really hungry, continued the daily exercise streak and it almost seemed I was going to go to bed with only 500 calories or so in me – 2 shakes and a can of tuna don’t add up to much. I thought that a bit low for health, even though I wasn’t hungry and had 2 hot dogs on lettuce, some pork rinds and butter and salsa, ans some asparagus.

I had mentioned ‘when hungry eat, when tired sleep’ as a goal last week – and broke it because I thought eating too little might be harmful…but is it? I’m trying to get thin – not get sick, but I have so little faith in the accurate interpretation of science surrounding nutrition and health that I wonder if it would have been totally harmless not to eat.

Total calories for the day: 1253.  Fat: 88g, Net carbs: 9g, Protein: 94g (64/5/30%)

Thursday, March 15, 2012 – 202.2

If I recall, the Ides of March wasn’t all that great a day for Caesar, either…

If you don’t mind, we’re going to have to put this day down as my 12-week plan version of a ‘Get Out of Jail Free Card’. It was a very stressful day at work and while I brought healthy stuff, I needed a reward, so at lunch I went out and bought mortadella and american cheese. I feel sorry for people on strict low-calorie diets – what do they do – have an extra rice cake?

Problem was – I ate a bit much, and it made me awfully thirsty, so I had a diet soda – the first I can remember since last year. No biggie, but the appetite was not under control. I also forgot my keys in the car, which I never do – I think it reflects just how distracted and stresses I was. I’m also coming down with a cold. I exercised, but it was the hardest it’s been since the beginning. I had to drag myself there, and my self-talk that tried to talk me out of it had a hard time convincing me I couldn’t do 10 freakin’ minutes.

I had certainly eaten my fill by the time I had gotten home, hung with the kids and wife, and I went to bed, but hunger was gnawing at me, so I raided the fridge: pizza, baguette with butter, some home-made apple pie. A Lindt chocolate or 2. I also downed a liter of seltzer, which with all the carbs I ate, will slosh around in me for a few days.

When I’ve had blowouts before, when I tallied the calories, it really wasn’t all that bad. Regardless, I had too many itsy-bitsies, so I’m sure my tally is off a bit.

Summary: I fucked up – now to get over it and try again tomorrow.

One small ray of hope: my wife, who really has no need for a diet from a weight perspective, is going on the Ultramind Solution Diet to feel better – and this restricts sugar, dairy and wheat. Not a perfect overlap, but it might reduce the number of goodies I can find about the house when in the vacuum-cleaner mode.

Total calories for the day: 2,879.  Fat: 205, Net carbs: 104g, Protein: 141g (64/16/20%)

Friday, March 16, 2012 – 205.6 

The shake on the way to work, then some roast beef and butter. Early afternoon I found myself, seemingly helpless, going  to Dunkin Donuts for an extra-large coffee with cream. The thing is huge, and assuming 180 calories for the cream might be too low – and it’s not like the crack team at Dunkin Donuts uses a graduated cylinder to measure the stuff out. I also found my self – again, seemingly helpless, eating an emergency Atkins bar stowed away in the car.

My stomach not feeling at all well in the afternoon, I had another Atkins shake on the way home while wondering if anyone attempted to make a low carb White Russian with one of these by adding vodka. A passing idle thought, since I don’t drink at present.

At home I stopped to exercise and went through my routine rather quickly, though a bit sore. I ran through 2 rounds of the 3 machines rather quick – maybe too quick, as I found myself dizzy and winded for a brief spell, then finished up after a rest. I did calculate that the 70 pounds on each of the 3 machines at 10 repetitions is me hauling a little more than 1 ton each time – so I’m moving 3 tons of metal each workout.

When I got home, the wife wanted to get out of the house – she worked from home and was restless. We ended up walking the neighborhood, then took a ride for coffee for her and a walk in our nearby downtown.

At least 3 days this past week I’ve walked for at least 20-30 minutes, just because I felt like it. I think exercise leads to exercise naturally, which is perhaps why I am so conflicted about it: some people think it a moral imperative to exercise – I like to look at things I do in life in a joyful fashion. It’s all play – everything – when you approach it in the right way, and it’s a helluva less miserable and sanctimonious way to go through life.

Despite the fact I didn’t get home and settled in until after 9pm, I still went on a tear in the kitchen and had a mortadella and cheese sandwich – yes, with 2 slices bread, some pasta (it was sitting on the counter, just asking for it), some asparagus, and a huge portion – maybe 8-10 ounces – of skirt steak leftover from earlier in the week. I topped that off with the remains of the Lindt chocolate candy that I ate on my wife the other day – she can’t have it on her diet – so it’s like I was doing her a favor…right?

Total calories for the day: 2,966.  Fat: 198g, Net carbs: 85g, Protein: 175g (61/15/24%)

Saturday, March 10, 2012 – 204.0

Strange week, for a number of reasons. I started at 203.4, and ended at 204.0 – a 0.6 pound difference is insignificant. I also ate a lot, ate a little, was in ketosis – and wasn’t – and my weight stayed within a 3-pound range. If all this was simple calories in-calories out, I’d gain weight when I eat a lot of calories, and lose when I ate a few. Instead, the week shows that I ate more than I planned and lost weight – and ate less and lost weight.

When you look at it, really, it seems that nothing I do - short-term at least – matters. I can eat double the amount of calories from one day to the next and maintain my weight just fine.

Right at this moment I am wondering if I should try to go low-calorie next week or high calorie. Maybe I should try the ‘fat fast’ notion and get the fat up and eat near 3000 calories – just to see what happens. I’m toying with the idea.

As it’s the weekend after a very stressful week, it might be a good idea to tackle the ‘eating quality food’ issue, as I don’t think I really covered that this past week. Some of what I ate was OK, but I don’t consider Atkins shakes or pork rinds ‘health food’. I think they’re OK – a shake a day for convenience and the pork rinds as an occasional snack are fine – the rest should be real food.

To this end I’ve lined up the ingredients from this ‘Mexican kale recipe‘ but will substitute spinach and make a bunch – see if I can subsist on this for a number of meals this week. I’m also going to try a cauliflower pizza crust recipe one commenter suggested.

If I succeeded anywhere this week, it was in continuing the exercise habit, or the ‘practice’ of exercise. I keep relating it to meditation, and approach it in the same way – a practice, not focused on the quality, or counting, or really going anywhere with it at present. I do the same brief workout every day – and that’s it. I don’t bother to count the exercise in my calorie counter because I don’t believe that exercise helps you lose weight – and I’m not doing this: “I exercised X and burned X calories, and now I can eat the equivalent in Snackwells cookies.”

I’m not exercising to lose weight. I’m exercising to exercise. Might it help with weight loss? Might I get some muscle definition? Might it improve my metabolic rate? Might it lead to better health?

Maybe – maybe not. It’s not why I’m exercising. If I was doing it for any of these reasons and they didn’t appear on some expected schedule, I might stop exercising. It’s exactly how one should approach meditation. Does meditation help with focus, concentration, calmness? Maybe  - but that’s not why you meditate. You meditate to meditate. It’s the end in itself.

I am less happy with the goal of calorie-counting. Not because I didn’t do it, but because I did. Calorie-counting sucks, and the only reason I am doing it is as a feedback mechanism. It’s an interesting data point, and I am hoping that it will reveal info I can use. Right now it’s told me that when ‘I eat a lot’ – some times it’s not a lot. A quick look on the Internet says an average guy should eat around 2500 calories a day. My average this week – if I didn’t screw up the average – was 2,250. I also seem to eat about 60% fat without trying. As to carbs, even on a day with me eating chocolates, my carb level – 120 – is still lower than what my doctor considered a ‘low carb diet’ – 150. The average was 65 grams.

As to eating this day, as is usual for the day after a lot of carbs, I was hungry early and had an Atkins shake. I also had 1 fried egg – a leftover from the eggs I cooked my younger daughter. With the wife at the dentist, the kids and I headed to the store to get the ingredients for ‘Bangers and Mash’ – the English pub meal of sausages, mashed potatoes, onions and brown gravy that is awesomely good – but none for Daddy (hopefully) – this is for the wife and kids. I’ll stick to my concoctions.

Around noon I had some kimchi, and a bit after that I went to make a hot dog for my younger daughter, went to the kitchen and found my older daughter had left most of a hot dog before leaving with my wife for the afternoon. I offered it to my younger daughter, but her 5-year-old palate isn’t sophisticated enough for mustard yet – she’s a ketchup-on-hot-dog kind of gal.

Before I knew what happened – I ate it. WTF?!? Then it happened again. A piece of old cheesecake – gone, just like that. Then half a tub of Hagen Daz Blueberry Crumble Ice Cream my daughter picked out at our earlier shopping trip. I dutifully recorded it in my LoseIt! iPhone application. Ok…it isn’t going to be a low carb day by any stretch, but I might be able to keep the calories to a reasonable amount…

I then did some research to figure out what was going on – it seemed that I had lost control or something. A quick search turned up the answer: Alien Hand Syndrome. From the article:

Alien hand syndrome (AHS) is a rare neurological disorder that causes hand movement without the person being aware of what is happening or having control over the action. The afflicted person may sometimes reach for objects and manipulate them without wanting to do so, even to the point of having to use the healthy hand to restrain the alien hand.

I told my daughter this when I explained that I ate half her ice cream. She didn’t buy it and told me it was: “because I had no backbone.”

“That hurts.” I told her.

Seriously, though, what I found strange was that after the ice cream, I was satisfied for hours. Usually, carbs set me off for an uncontrollable hunger. This didn’t. All I had the remainder of the day was some weak coffee and half-and half, then I did have a bit of the ‘bangers & mas’h I made for the family – mostly the sausage, some of the fried onion, and maybe a tablespoon or 2 of the potatoes.

Total calories for the day: 1,743.  Fat: 118g, Net carbs: 64g, Protein: 79g (63/18/19%)

To be continued…

• A relatively small jar of Bubbies sauerkraut is $4.99. That’s a lot for about 25 cents worth of cabbage. It just bothers me
• A much larger and cheaper jar of Claussen sauerkraut contains additives ‘to preserve flavor’. I’d rather not do the preservatives – and it’s still way expensive for what is probably 50 cents worth of cabbage.
• I’d also like to be able to have my sauerkraut made from organic cabbage and avoid pesticide residues and GMOs – but that’s just me.

So I began to research making your own sauerkraut. It seemed kinda easy, only requiring cabbage, a little technique, and a little patience. I found a recipe on About.com and on Mark’s Daily Apple. I also found a link and a video for ThePerfectPickler.com which offers a nifty-looking kit that I might buy sometime in the future – but I wanted to experiment first.

Briefly, the science as I understand it. Please – if anybody reading this knows more than I do and I got it wrong, please correct me. The cabbage will ferment all by itself just by the naturally occurring bacteria on it. The fermentation process is an anaerobic process, however, so air is bad. The fermentation process, however, will create carbon dioxide gas, so there needs to be a way that gas can escape.

The problem here is that if gas can get out – air can usually get in. This problem requires some creativity on the part of putting the shredded cabbage in the jar. First, you want to keep the cabbage itself under the liquid to keep the air off of it and to ensure it ferments. With the jar open to allow air to escape, however, white mold can or will form as a film on top. This is supposedly harmless and can be skimmed off when it’s done. There’s a huge YUCK! factor to this, of course, and this, I believe, is solved by the Perfect Pickler and its unusual glass tube out the top.

The twisty glass or plastic tube (I don’t know which) can be filled with water and acts like the drain in your kitchen sink. The U in the glass will let gas out, but no air in, which I think keeps the air out, and the mold from growing.

Clever idea – but I wanted to try anyway without. So for this experiment I used:

1. 1/4 head of organic, locally grown cabbage, with one outer leaf washed and reserved (you’ll see why)
2. 1/2 teaspoon salt (which ended up being 1.5 tsp)
3. Old peanut butter jar
4. French rolling-pin – really just a flat stick
5. My mandoline – what I consider to be my most dangerous kitchen gadget

It patiently waits for me to be careless...

I first used the mandoline to shred the cabbage, being careful due to the fact that the mandoline, in order to use it, requires you to push your fingers toward a very sharp cutting edge repeatedly. That safety guard they sell it with? They don’t actually intend you to use it – it’s useless – their lawyers just make them put it in the box to defend against the lawsuits from people missing bits of fingertip due to these things.

I placed the shredded cabbage in a bowl, washed it, and drained it as best I could, then I salted it and mixed it about a bit. In one of the instructions, I think, it said to let it stand for a bit, but I don’t follow directions.

Ready to go: my French rolling-pin and peanut butter jar

Now, as the video on the perfect pickler website showed, I placed the cabbage in and pounded it with the end of the French roller:

The phrase 'pounding the cabbage' sounds risqué, doesn't it?

Once all the cabbage has been added, there is the challenge of keeping the cabbage below the level of the liquid. I borrowed a bit from the Perfect Pickler guy, but I’m lazier than him. He uses 2 layers of cabbage leaf, seemingly cut to high precision. Me – I just used the lid of the peanut butter jar to cut out 2 rounds of cabbage leaf.

Cookie-cutting, but with cabbage

This gave me 2 perfectly round cabbage-leaf  ’covers’ – these would help keep the shredded stuff under the liquid.

Well, as 'perfectly round' as one can make a cabbage leaf...

Now they went into the top of the jar to cover the shredded cabbage.

See?

The next thing was to make sure it was under pressure – pushed down below the line of the liquid. There is also the notion that the liquid will expand, and this also explains why it’s not filled to the top – to leave room for expansion.

To hold the stuff down, I found a little glass ketchup bottle – a mini size, meant for restaurants to give out to individual customers. I put water in and boiled it in the microwave to sterilize it. I knew it was sterilized when I heard a small ‘boom’ in the microwave and saw that the majority of the water had exploded out of the bottle, leaving it mostly empty.

I then put this in the jar on top of my circular leaves. Before doing so, I wiped the sides of the jar to remove the stray cabbage shred, thinking this might reduce the grossness later.

These two are going to be new best friends

Here’s the finished product, with the top only just threaded on so as to allow gasses to escape.

Ready for fermenting

I now had to find a place to put this so it will remain unmolested and at about 68 degrees. The back of my cupboard seemed to be a good place, so it went there.

The next morning, surfing about on the topic still, I noticed I made perhaps a fatal flaw – too little salt. I checked out the jar and honestly, it looked exactly like it did yesterday, and did not seem to smell of anything other than what shredded cabbage would smell like.

While less than ideal, I added another teaspoon, making the total number of teaspoons 1.5. I put the top back on and shook it, which I thought less than ideal, but the best it was going to get – I wasn’t going to take the entire thing out and remix at this point.

One week later I checked out the jar. It looked fine, actually. None of the harmless mold that I was told would form was there. I gave it a sniff – smelled like sauerkraut. I took out the little bottle holding the contents below the liquid line, wiped the inside surface of the glass above the liquid clean just in case there was any mold I couldn’t see, and stuck it in the fridge.

The next day I got up the courage to try it. I briefly thought of googling ‘death by improperly fermented cabbage’ but forged ahead and filled a small bowl with the stuff.

I ate some. Actually, pretty good. The salting was uneven due to my putting in more salt at the last-minute, so some parts seemed a bit salty, but other parts were just fine. The fermentation flavor I got was less intense than the store-bought types, but still prominent, with slightly different flavor notes, but definitely prominent, and not half-bad. I finished that cup and went back for more. Good stuff.

It’s the next day and I did not die in my sleep from improperly fermented cabbage, which encourages me to try this again. I now have some mason jars I got for $1.00 each, a technique that seems to work. I’ll have to try this again.

© 2012, LowCarbConfidential.com

Binder clips - not just for papers anymore

This isn’t mine – I found this one over at The Fork Left Behind.

I tried this recipe and followed it to the letter – which I don’t usually do. I salted the bird and let it sit in the fridge for 3 hours, then let it sit covered on the counter top cover for another hour. Did the garlic bit and sealed it up with office binder clips (I didn’t have toothpicks). This was as *awesome* as the author described.

My wife asked why I just didn’t buy one of the roast birds at the store – and then she tasted it. My daughters loved it as well, my older one saying: “I don’t usually like chicken, but I like this chicken.”

Do yourself a favor and try this recipe – it is going to become a go-to recipe for me, certainly.

Check it out. This recipe ruined the notion of a store-bought roast chicken forever.

UPDATE: I asked the blog author if I could post the recipe verbatim here, and she generously agreed. Please don’t make that an excuse not to visit her blog – she’s got some interesting things cooking that are low carb-friendly – and some interesting posts as well.

Crispy Garlicky Roasted Chicken

•  One 3-4lb chicken
• 1.5 tsp sea salt
• 1 tsp pepper
• 1 bulb of garlic, cloves separated but left unpeeled

1. Salt and pepper chicken as soon as you think of roasting on – sometime between 2 and 24 hours before. Return salted chicken to the refrigerator.
2. Remove chicken 1 hour before ready to cook and allow to come to room temperature, more or less.
3. Preheat oven to 400F and fill cavity with garlic cloves and seal cavity closed using a toothpick.
4. Using a small* roasting pan or dish, add a little olive oil to the pan and then add the chicken breast side up. Roast 20 minutes.
5. Turn chicken breast side down and continue to roast another 20 minutes.
6. Flip chicken once more and roast breast side up for the final 20 minutes.
7. Allow chicken to rest for 20 minutes so that juices can redistribute. Remove roasted garlic from cavity and serve alongside chicken.

*It is essential to use a roasting pan or dish or even pie plate approximately the same size of your chicken. This will ensure that the juices and fat that come from the chicken don’t burn.

It is extremely important to note that my wife specifically asked me to make this. I probably have 100 different recipes here – she’s asked me to make maybe 3 or 4 of them (the kale soup is one I remember offhand).

• 5 oz. package of baby kale the wife bought on sale and I could imagine no one eating
• 5 strips of bacon leftover from some other experiment
• 1/2 yellow onion, chopped
• 1 small zucchini, grated
• 1/2 cup of Argentine parmesan cheese (similar in flavor to the authentic stuff but softer) – feel free to substitute here
• 6 eggs
• 1-7oz container Fage whole Fat plain Yogurt
• 4 tablespoons butter
• Salt and pepper
  

I’ve been trying to involve my daughter in cooking as I think it’s an important life-skill to be able to cook at least a little bit, and it’s also great father-daughter time together. She’s usually willing to help – as long as I chop the onions. She took the stove duty while I prepped the ingredients.

First the butter was melted, then the onions went in. As she was cooking these, I tackled the bacon. The recipe I riffed off said to microwave the bacon.

Microwave? I’ve never seen that done, at least successfully, but hey – she pulled it off – I’ll give it a try.

Thinking the stuff would splatter all over the inside of the microwave, I placed the bacon in a single layer on a dinner plate, covered the bacon with a paper towel and cooked for 6 minutes. It worked perfectly. The paper towel soaked up some of the bacon drippings, but not all of it – good – that’s going in the Quiche.

I then used a pair of kitchen scissors to cut the bacon it bits – WAY less messy than transferring them to some surface and chopping them, making every surface greasy.

In the meantime, the kid had thrown in the baby kale and it had cooked nicely. I tossed the bacon and the drippings in the pan and the kid cooked it a little more. She put in salt and pepper. The salt she estimated at about a teaspoon and a half – the pepper was fresh cracked – maybe 4 or 5 turns.

I also grabbed a small zucchini and using a box grater, grated it over the skillet, which took about a minute.

I then put the grated cheese in a deep bowl and put in the 6 eggs. My daughter and I poured the contents of the skillet into the bowl and mixed them together, then the result was poured into a well-greased 12″ circular baking dish and popped in the preheated 350 degree oven for 30 minutes.

So where’s the pictures? It came out beautiful and rose nicely, and I wish that I had the *chance* to take a picture but my family descended on in like a flock of hungry ravens, leaving only a 1/4 of the thing left. Even my younger daughter, who would choose to live on candy if she could negotiate it, enjoyed it.

I had my reservations about using the kale, but it’s flavor went well with the others – I most certainly would use it again.

With a little help like I had, the prep is low enough that this can be whipped together after work if you’re feeling energetic. I can see myself doing this as a routine with my daughter, and no one in the family apparently would object.

As to carbs, I can’t imagine each piece having more than 2 or 3 grams – and all of them the highest quality. This is a fine recipe to get into induction with.

© 2012, LowCarbConfidential.com

Last night I made this, it came out quite good, and I thought I would share.

This is yet another variation on what I’ve done before. It provides a meat and vegetable-filled dish similar to a chili or stew in consistency, and, covered in grated parmesan cheese, it not only awesome, but fills that hole left by foregoing both pasta and traditional pizza on a low carb diet.

This is more a technique than a hard and fast recipe. The basis of this for me is usually grass-fed ground beef. A pound of this, bought directly from the farmer, is expensive – $8.00/lb., but I also comes with a high degree of probability that the stuff is the real deal. The problem with food in general is that if you want ‘organic’, the good stuff looks pretty much like the cheap stuff, and fraud is an issue. Less so if you know the farmer himself – and see his kids at the market.

I don’t want to use this stuff in burgers – they’ll be gone in a flash, so I try to use the meat more as a flavoring.

Now for those of you who could care less about organic – the regular supermarket ground beef is just fine in this recipe.

The next part of the technique is to find the abandoned and forgotten food items – the can of whatever in the back of the cupboard, or the forgotten frozen veggies, or the middle-aged but still viable fresh veggie and give its brief existance some meaning as part of this dish.

The last part of the technique is a jar of pasta sauce. I have long searched for a pasta sauce that is low carb, organic, tasty, and cheap. The winner is Whole Foods 365 Brand Mushroom Marinara Sauce. While it has 6 grams of net carb per half cup, all of these carbs are from natural ingredients and not sugar – and since I’m on a low-carb and not a no-carb diet, I think that 3 grams of carbs from veggies and mushrooms per serving are fine – and I have also eaten this in the past during Atkins Induction and had not problem getting into or maintaining ketosis.

So – this particular time I ended up with as my ingredients:

• 2 lbs. grass-fed ground beef
• 1 jar Whole Foods 365 Organic Mushroom Marinara Sauce
• 1 can pitted olives
• 1 package of frozen asparagus
• 2 sweet onions, chopped into 1″ chunks
• 6 sun-dried tomatoes, packed dry, and cut into bits with kitchen scissors
• 2 teaspoons crushed garlic
• 4 fresh tomatoes, chopped into approx. 1″ chunks
• 1 tablespoon of butter
• oregano to taste
• cayenne pepper to taste (if desired)
• salt
• pepper
• Fresh parmesan cheese

The cooking is relatively straightforward. Melt the butter in a large skillet and place the meat in. I could have used 1 pound of beef and more veggies, but I had defrosted both and decided to make a meatier sauce. Cook the meat on high with a little salt and pepper added, breaking it up into bite-sized chunks. If you take the time to brown the meat for an extra flavor dimension, good for you – I didn’t – I just got it to the point where the bit-sized chunks were of a more or less uniform size and held together – I was in a rush as we were going shopping any minute.

Next went in the onions, which again, I tried to coat in the meat and butter flavors and cook a bit before adding more. Next up was the asparagus, which I microwaved to unfreeze. While it had a good flavor, it was wilted a bit having been frozen, and a bit stringy. As a sauce ingredient, it would be fine, but I did cut it crosswise at 1″ lengths to lessen the impact of any fibrous parts of the asparagus from ruining the dish.

The remainder of the seasonings and veggies went in then, and I let these cook together for maybe 7 minutes on high, stirring them to ensure nothing burned. This is when a nice fragrance began to come from the dish as the ingredients began to meld and cook.

The 7 or so minutes later, I poured in the jar of sauce, turned the heat to low, gave it a stir, and put the lid on. I let this simmer for an hour, with an occasional stir.

When done, I served it with large peels of parmesan cheese that I scraped off the block of cheese with a vegetable peeler. This parmesan cheese was a bit softer than the usual variety, so this worked out well and certainly grabbed the attention of the family – it apparently made for a nicer presentation, at least to them.

Alas, the kids, being anti-vegetable when it came to sauce ingredients, didn’t think much of it. To hell with them – I thought it came out great. This will get eaten, and I’ll make it again. It’s a great go-to recipe/technique.

While a little high in carbs, every carb in it is from high-quality vegetable sources – the kind you need, even on a low carb diet. And the past few days I have been going for Ketosis and showing a trace each morning – and after eating 2 bowls of this, I am still testing the same, so nothing wrong there.

© 2012, LowCarbConfidential.com

For the past month, I have been in an immersive course of Anthony Bourdain and his writing, as well as had the experience of cuisine of another country while on vacation. Not just as a tourist eating at the hotel restaurants, but more like a food anthropologist, spending a good portion of our time in the Caribbean in grocery stores, looking at what the locals eat, inspecting each aisle of the store, fumbling with packages in French, and trying to figure out what the hell was in them due to my not knowing the language.

And never, to my recollection, eating at a ‘touristy’ restaurant. It was either casual French-inspired dining, or simple local fare.

It has been illuminating, to say the least.

Looking back to what ‘food’ was in my formative years, my mom used to lament that she wished for the day her cooking would be replaced by a pill. That sorta sums it up.

It was the 60s, and Dow Chemical’s motto was ‘Better living through chemistry’. Astronauts and space were big things in the zeitgeist, and Tang was considered cool. While not a Tang family, I was particularly enamored of some chocolate-flavored stick of god-knows-what bearing the resemblance of a long but much softer Tootsie Roll. These were called ‘Space Food Sticks’, and – holy shit! – here’s the commercial that turned me into a fan:

Believe me, this might look pretty lame 40 years later, but slap a label on anything that related it to the space program then and you could have sold old socks by the truckload.

Going back to my Mom, food was typically a weekly routine of meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and peas and pearl onions from a can on one day, pasta and meatballs with a home-made sauce and italian bread the next, then breaded chicken fried in a frying pan with more mashed potatoes and carrots. For variety their might be hamburgers and fries. Once yearly fare included an Easter ham, Thanksgiving turkey with stuffing made by buying bread and letting it go stale for a few days on the stairs, corned beef and cabbage with boiled potatoes for St Patrick’s day, mostly for my dad, who was half Irish, as well as the rare and exotic ‘helushki’, which was supposed to be some concoction with potatoes and cottage cheese that my dad would ask for every few years and my mother would bravely attempt to cook – and which I loathed.

Dessert was maybe Jello, or Entenmanns baked goods. Occasionally a cake made from a cake mix. Bread was Wonder Bread – ‘building strong bodies in 12 ways’ – at least that’s what the commercial said.

Sometimes on the weekend, my dad, who controlled the purse strings, might feel rich and decide to order a pizza (no toppings – I didn’t know pizza ever came with toppings until my later years) or Chinese takeout – always the same – chicken chow mein, egg rolls and egg-drop soup. I honestly did not know that until I was about 9 or 10 when my sister, old enough to buy and pay for her own Chinese takeout, brought something different home.

I could go on and continue to clearly establish that I was not brought up with the creds for a ‘food snob’, but I think you get the idea. As I morphed into early adulthood, the food patterns were set, and nothing changed.

Like a lot of Americans, I suffered from what at least one person called food neophobia – the fear of new foods. If it was a new cereal or candy bar, that’s a different story, but to eat snails? Oysters? Sushi? I did not see the need or reason for such exotica, and no sense of adventure that drew me to consume these things.

But, as it always does, love changes things.

I met my future wife, who grew up in a culture with very different foods. There was no way that I was going to charm her with my notions of cuisine. Instead, she charmed me with hers.

I ate things I would have thought I would only put in my mouth to win a substantial bet – and I liked them. When I started at this, I would frequently think: millions of people eat this and don’t die – this was how I needed to reason to myself in order to get through some of these meals.

The need to reason with myself like this quickly disappeared.

While still blissfully stupid about the details behind these meals, the cultures that created them, the spices and the cooking techniques that made them great, and what friggin fork or plate to use at the appropriate time, I was enjoying this adventure. As it required me only to sit and eat, it was perfect  for me.

I had slowly gone from someone with food neophobia to a person with food neophilia – a person who likes to try new foods, but these were occasional adventures only. I always came home to the comfort foods of my youth: frozen pizza, Eskimo pies, a bowl of pasta covered in grocery store sauce and topped with Kraft parmesan cheese.

I was still an idiot about food, just a slightly more experienced idiot. I enjoyed these new foods like a dog might – without comprehending anything about how or why or where – just shovel down the gullet until full.

And – as readers of this blog certainly know – I got fat, and kept getting fatter.

Then I started low carbing – Atkins – in 2003. I had to say goodbye to a lot of the comfort foods of my youth, and in order to not fail on Atkins, you have to be able to go beyond the stereotype of bacon, eggs and steak because few people are going to be able to live on that for a lifetime.

And here is where that prior experience with learning to try new foods really helped me out. In fact, it might explain why I succeeded (at this very moment 60 lbs. down from my high in 2003) and so many fail.

As a kid, I am sure that a sardine had never crossed the threshold of my home in the years I lived under my parent’s roof. Using my prior experience with trying new things, I’ve come to terms with sardines. I like ‘em. I like ‘em in a tomato sauce. Or mediterranean style – not as much as mashed potatoes smeared on a piece of buttered bread – but I like ‘em.

And I also find when I track what I eat against my weight loss, that the periods of times when I’m eating these little fishies are the times that I lose weight.

This blog is filled with experiments consisting of me trying a new food. Many of these are failures.

This brings me back to Anthony Bourdain, my current banishment of science from my weight loss ‘journey’, and a comment from a reader on a previous blog post that essentially says: It’s about the food.

Anthony Bourdain, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the man, was a chef at a French restaurant, an ex-heroin addict, an ex-cokehead, who wrote a book called ‘Kitchen Confidential‘, which was a memoir about his years as a chef, about food, and about the restaurant business. It became a New York Times bestseller. He has since turned the success of this book into at least 2 different TV shows (neither of which I’ve watched as I don’t watch TV) and at least three other books I know of.

I didn’t go looking for his book – it found me. Someone had the audio version and at the time, I had a long, long commute. I’d listen to anything as I’m not a fan of the radio in the first place, and my commute – situated dead smack in the middle of two prime radio markets, meant that if I were to try to listen to radio, the signals from each market compete with each other, one station dropping out while the other gained a temporary advantage due to terrain, weather conditions, God knows what, only to be replaced moments later by the other station again.

I had no interest in what a cook does, or what a chef does. I wasn’t a food snob.

But Anthony Bourdain is neither – at least in the traditional sense.

While I do not understand entirely what the fellow is talking about when he discusses French dishes, nor am I entirely clear on what a sous chef is, his unpretentious, authentic, and engaging prose made me want to find out more. And, to be perfectly honest, his drug-laced, profane, street-talk manner of presenting his views on fine food, by necessity, strip it of any pretense.

Anthony Bourdain is not better than you. He does not talk down to you. When he gets on a high horse, he calls himself on it and is the first to label himself  ’pretentious asshole’. I like that in a person.

This, as much as the fact that the man can tell a story, as well as his writing is so engaging, has made what might be called ‘gourmet foods’ or ‘fine dining’ – terms that sound prissy to me and conjure up images of lace cuffs on a man’s shirt - accessible to me now.

On my desk at the moment, cramping my left arm from typing this, I have his books, A Cook’s Tour and Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook. I also have the audio version of Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook.

Of the cookbook, there’s a sentence in the review that sums up the book – and Anthony Bourdain’s entire body of work:

Even though many of the dishes can be found in other cookbooks, what sets this one apart is Bourdain’s signature wise-ass attitude that pervades nearly every recipe, explanatory note and chapter introduction. Profanity adds frequent color. If Aunt Doris would blanche at pearl onions being called “little fuckers,” a cook who prefers boneless meat in Daube Provençal a “poor deluded bastard,” or a person nervous about making these recipes a “dipshit,” this book is not for her.

As I mentioned before, you don’t equate that sort of thing with the stereotype of the prissy French chef or the food snob, and it makes this world more accessible and interesting to me.

Now we come to my current banishment of science again. I am currently reading a history of dieting called ‘Never Satisified’ and while I have only partly read it, it’s apparent that a LOT of the ‘latest thinking’ on dieting is just recycled crap from the past.

And even worse: once we allowed nutritionists to dictate what we eat based on the latest notions of health, rather than listening to the people who know how food is supposed to be enjoyed, a lot of us were doomed to be fat.

And we Americans have been doing this for a long, long, long time.

I went on vacation and ate with only minimal thought about carbs. I avoided eating full portions of desserts, but would have a taste. I avoided any carbs not worth it, but did have the awesome mustard seed potato chips imported from France and unavailable in the US. I enjoyed picking up the baguettes, just taken from the oven, and walking the store eating half the loaf. I don’t know how we Americans can screw up a simple baguette, but they don’t taste like that here.

In 10 days, I gained a pound. Essentially, statistically: nothing.

Here’s why, I think. If the explanation sounds somewhat muddled, it’s because I’m still noodling through this.

Some of you might be familiar with Abraham Maslow. In an era where psychology was more philosophy and still influenced by Freud’s bullshit, Maslow was coming up with some interesting ideas. One famous one was his ‘heirarchy of needs’ – shown below:

You will notice where food is on this list, folks – at the bottom. In terms of our needs, food comes before family, health, property, friendship, self-esteem, and a bunch of others.

Food is also a true universal across time and culture. You might not understand another person, their religious views, their culture, or their time period, but we can all relate to a good meal, of good ingredients, shared with family and friends.

What we Americans have done – and are quickly exporting to every corner of the globe – is the notion that ‘food’ – and what we eat – should be left to the scientists. We have bought into this thinking. It is more likely that a food in a box with a label will make some claim about calories or vitamins than it will make a claim that it tastes good.

We eat for health, and yet we are more unhealthy than ever. We eat foods that claim to be low calorie and good for weight loss, and yet we are fatter than ever.

When I dined on vacation, I remember one night out at a restaurant. When the meal was brought to me, I recall how small the portions of the meat, the vegetable and the starch were compared to an American plate served at most resturants. In America, quantity IS quality.

The thing was – this meal was one of the most memorable meals of my life. The flavors of each meshed perfectly. Just a little of each – the starch, the vegetable, and the meat (I believe it was duck breast cooked rare), was perfection. We finished off the meal with a dessert that was a work of art: a ‘cigar’ made of chocolate. A sculpture made so beautiful and so authentic looking that it was almost a sin to eat it. It stood on a little stand, and even the ash was simulated from some sort of sugar concoction that was not just sugar, but some subtle, complex flavor.

This was shared by the table. Unlike in the US where dessert might be a massive ‘triple-chocolate-double-brownie overload’ with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream on top, this was subtle, and this was also small.  The meal was paced – not too fast and not too slow – and it seemed more like a performance than a meal. It was a small place, run by 2 women, and I told one of the owners that exact thing. She smiled proudly – this person looked at what they were doing as a work of ephemeral art, and she was glad I had noticed.

I don’t recall being hungry after this.

This is how the French supposedly eat. Small portions of whatever the hell they want, but it is instinctively good for you – and good tasting, too. Other than a nasty tendency toward liver disease due perhaps to an excess of wine, their weight and their health is better than the Americans.

We now end up with a comment on my post about being tired of all the arguing about science. Which diet is better, which supplement is better, is low carb good or evil? Is vegan healthier? What about vitamin B12? This study is good, that study is shit, my diet doc can kick the ass of your diet doc, Etc., etc., etc.

One commenter left the following:

I too get a bit tired of the arguing myself. It can be great at times, but some of it really cheapens the whole movement, which I think is not just low carb, but creating a real food culture.

Damn straight.

What I am thinking is that we need to tell the nutritionists of all stripes to screw off. Instead of them looking at us like some caged animals who need to be kept healthy,  perhaps there need to be a new route to health, weight loss and wellness that doesn’t focus on calories, carbs, proteins and vitamins, but rather keeps them at hand, in the background as a handy general reference rather than some bible on how to eat – perhaps it’s chefs that should teach us how to eat and dietitians should work to fit their creations into our lives rather than having dietitions act like chefs, creating food without magic, that become merely fuel - soylent greeen become real – and stripping from us all the one common thread that unites all faiths, political persuasions, and cultures – the joy of food and eating.

We need to refrain from the American ‘Grand Slam’ breakfast, where quantity equals quantity, but we also need to avoid the food moralists and their cultish notions of science – as well as the ‘food scientists’, coming up with the next fake foods.

Food is a basic human need, and should also be a joy as well. It should be enough but not too much, it should be prepared from the best ingredients possible, it should be prepared with pride, and not eaten in a rush. And as Anthony Bourdain pointed out in Medium Raw, almost no one knows how to ‘cook’ anymore, except for the food snobs.

I think I need to cook more, and learn some techniques other than ‘throw everything into pot’. Simple basic cooking techniques might be the best way for a lot of us to learn to respect food, respect ourselves, enjoy what we eat, and lose weight at the same time.

© 2012, LowCarbConfidential.com

It’s just how we’re taught: got a problem? Buy something to fix it.

A lot of folks think that they can fix their crappy diet by popping vitamins and supplements. I for one. Until perhaps 6 months ago, I would take a handful of supplements, including:

1. a multivitamin without iron
2. COQ 10
3. Alpha-Lipoic Acid and Acetyl L-Carnitine
4. Magnesium
5. Fish Oil
6. Calcium+D
7. Vitamin E
8. Selenium
9. GarlicMax
10. Ginseng

At one point I was using old prescription medicine bottles, and due to the fact that some on the list needed to be taken in multiples, I sometimes could not fit all of a day’s supplements in a single bottle.

But then I stopped taken them completely. Here was my concern at the time: I had read a very good book by the name ‘Swindled’, which described the food adulteration problems in England in the 1800s and in the US later into the 1900s. I do not want to do the book discredit by giving it a review, but I’ll note just one example (out of dozens and dozens described in this wonderfully written history) that comes to mind.

In England in the 1800s, it was customary to cook pickles in copper pots because the copper gave them a bright green color, making them look a heckuva lot more yummy and the normal olive drab pickles.

You might have some copper pots at home yourself, they’re quite pretty, actually. I have a few myself.

You’ll notice that every last one of them is copper CLAD – meaning the copper is on the outside, and does not touch the food.

That’s because copper is poisonous. Really poisonous. From Wikipedia, in their usual overly technical prose for such things:

Acute symptoms of copper poisoning by ingestion include vomiting, hematemesis (vomiting of blood), hypotension (low blood pressure), melena (black “tarry” feces), coma, jaundice (yellowish pigmentation of the skin), and gastrointestinal distress.[2] Individuals with glucose-6-phosphate deficiency may be at increased risk of hematologic effects of copper.[2] Hemolytic anemia resulting from the treatment of burns with copper compounds is infrequent.[2]

Chronic (long-term exposure) effects of copper exposure can damage the liver and kidneys.[3]

People died eating these pickles. And it was only after public outcry that producers stopped boiling their pickles in copper pots and killing their patrons. Not because they necessarily felt some moral or ethical imperative, mind you – it was bad for business.

This all got me to thinking about these various powders and liquid gelcaps I was ingesting – what was actually in  these things? How can I be sure that the compound I am expecting, uncontaminated, is actually in there?

I can’t.

One thing I learned from ‘Swindled’ was that, the longer the distribution chain, from producer to consumer, the greater the likelihood that someone along the way, will, knowingly or unknowingly, adulterate the product you consume.

Supplements in the US are also unregulated. My understanding on how this works is that manufacturers are on the honor system about what is listed in the ingredients, and that’s that – until they get caught.

What sucks about this system is that I believe that the majority of supplement manufacturers are honestly and ethically trying to create the best damn product they can.

But it might not be them – it might be their supplier, or their supplier’s supplier.

Think about it. If you buy a multivitamin, look at all those ingredients.

Where do they all come from?

I thought about this for a long time…and decided that I’d try living without vitamins. I made a conscious effort to try to buy better quality food with the money saved in supplements and try to eat better instead. Buy organic. Buy local. Buy fresh.

I honestly feel about the same – maybe a little better, 6 month later. Certainly I weigh about 15 pounds less, though don’t jump to any conclusions about no vitamins = weight loss, because I am certainly not.

Then I came across this interesting article on msnbc.com, in which researchers found that people who took multivitamins were more likely to participate in risky behaviors, their conclusion being that the vitamins gave them a feeling of invulnerability. Patients in the study were given sugar pills and told they were taking supplements. These patients:

reported a greater sense of invulnerability and less of a desire to exercise. They also were more likely to consider engaging in casual sex, sunbathing and binge-drinking.

At the end of the study the two groups were told they could choose between a healthful meal and an all-you-can-eat buffet. Sure enough, more of those in the group who were told they’d taken a supplement said they’d prefer the buffet.

Here’s a link to another report on this from Scientific American, in case you’d like a more scholarly source.

I covered much the same ground in a previous post, but I thought the psychological study discussed above that I read after I wrote that one warranted another discussion on this topic.

So perhaps you might want to reconsider that New Year’s resolution about taking vitamins?

One of these ideas is the notion of food monotony I wrote about in January of 2010. I’ve come to disagree with a number of the items in this post – in particular, the notion of counting calories, which I find so onerous that I would rather be fat than do it daily. And I don’t think it really works.

The food monotony part, however, has been a direction I’ve gone, perhaps coming to it from that other angle I mentioned.

Part of what I’ve been doing is to work on a new type of tracking system for what I eat. It’s strange, but I have been doing it for a few months and I have been losing weight – not dramatic, but the trend is in the right direction and I am maintaining a lower weight consistently than I’ve been able to in the past 2 years.

The the strangeness of this tracking system is that I don’t track how much I eat – I only track what. If I eat 1 hot dog or 3, all I note for a given day is that I had 1 ‘hot dog as a food’ for the day. This seems to make me focus on ingredients more than quantities, and after a few months, identify what I really like that’s low carb – and what I need to be careful about.

It also shows me very clearly that I can lose weight on low carb and still eat cake, and cookies, and bread – I’m still trying to figure that one out, so please bear with me on that.

Another thing it has shown me are that there are certain foods that:

• Are high quality
• Easy
• Filling and do a very good job of controlling hunger
• I lose weight eating them
• Reasonably priced
• Availability – if I have to search high and low for the stuff, it’s just too high a price to pay
• Most important: I can eat them over and over without wanting to barf

I probably eat this stuff 5 days a week. I still don’t really eat breakfast still, so I usually end up having one of these at work sometime before noon. I mix in 3 drops of EZ-Sweetz (a zero-carb Splenda product) and most recently cinnamon (as an experiment – it’s purported to have the ability to increase insulin response). My understanding is that the cultures are good for you, the process that the cultures perform on the milk makes it more digestible, the carbs are not at an Atkins-level, but it doesn’t seem to bother me.

It being late summer in central New Jersey, tomatoes are in abundance, and we scored 25 lbs. of ripe tomatoes the size of ping-pong balls for $15.00 – $0.65 per lb. – a pretty good deal for locavore organic tomatoes.

The big problem is the committment that one makes. These guys have a lifespan of maybe 2 weeks? To use all these up before they get tossed means eating a pound of the things every single day for 2 weeks. I mentioned this to the wife as we considered buying the crate and she was game. Then everyone pretty much ignored the crate. I brought bags to work and munched on these things throughout the week. I also took the crate from its out-of-the-way location and placed it on the kitchen table (hint, hint), but someone just put it back. I needed to cook up some sausages I had bought last weekend, and because I needed to do something with the tomatoes they became the main ingredient. So here’s what we ended up with.

• 8 hot Italian sausages
• 30 or so of ping-pong ball-sized tomatoes, sliced in half
• 2 onions
• 2 green peppers
• garlic powder
• salt and pepper
• 4 tablespoons of olive oil
• 8 sun-dried tomatoes, cut in bits with kitchen scissors