• 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

The other day, before the start of yet another meeting at work, someone brought up Dr. Oz. One person said: “I always used to think that drinking skim milk was good for you, but Dr. Oz said you should drink 2%.” It was said as a revelation, a shock.

I couldn’t help myself: “You know, fat isn’t necessarily bad for you. In fact, fat can actually help you lose weight.”

I got either nervous giggles or blank stares. I fell for it again. I shouldn’t have bothered and just kept my mouth shut. I learned long ago that while my coworkers seem to like me, those that know something about my predilection toward low carb tend to think I’m something of a loony.

I once had a very intelligent and medically-trained co-worker who knew me well professionally explain me to a new hire as we discussed diets: “You have to understand he has some peculiar notions about nutrition.”

The other day, I shoveled snow for about an hour. Not one for exercise (at least not yet – it’s a resolution for 2012), the exertion tuckered me out.  I collapsed on the bed to recuperate.

My wife, who by the way did not help with the snow and was instead laying  in bed, said: “Your way of life is poisoning you.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“The way you eat. Look at you – you’re exhausted!”

I said back: “So you’re saying that if I hadn’t gone on a low carb diet eight years ago and lost 60 pounds, and instead ate pie all those years that I would have shoveled the snow in front of our house and still had enough leftover energy to shovel out a neighbor’s house?”

“Yes.” She said, only half-facetiously.

I have been putting up with this for eight years. From everyone. My doctor, my co-workers, my friends, my older kid (indoctrinated by school as to what ‘healthy eating’ is) – even my wife, who saw me go from puffy, bloated and lethargic to slimmer and more energetic.

Even if they like and respect me, they seem to make a sort of  ’carve out’ in their heads to accommodate me, as if I was this really nice guy they know who just happened to think he had been abducted by aliens.

I have found that if I discuss low carb with some people, at times it literally makes them uncomfortable. So I’ve stopped, for the most part – and keep my thoughts to myself, to anyone interested (less than I could count on 1 hand in the past 8 years), and this blog.

Now, although this galls me to no end, I have made an uneasy peace with this.  I was already a non-conformist by nature before I went low carb, so people had already categorized me as ‘off the wide part of the bell curve’ already, so my  low carb lifestyle was only a change in degree rather than a change in kind.

I just became a little more wacky to them than before. I didn’t go from normal to wacky.

But what about people who identify with ‘normal’? I’m a pretty live-and-let-live kinda guy, and I don’t expect people to conform to my way of thinking or seeing the world. There are many people, however, that do want their friends and peers to think along the same lines as they do. They like the self-validation of being surrounded by like-minded people.

I suspect that these people have a terrible time at low carb dieting, especially an Atkins-style VLCD (Very Low Carbohydrate Diet) and ketogenic diets. If they were to go on a conventional diet, they have peers who are most likely doing the same thing. They watch their fat intake together and have lively discussions was to the relative merits of the different varieties of Snackwells cookies and Lean Cuisines.

However, if one of this pair were to go on a low carb diet, the camaraderie would disappear in a flash – they would have no common ground, no self-validation that what they are doing is the right thing – either of them – and if the low carb dieter were to assert that those Lean Cuisine frozen dinners were actually doing the other harm, they would probably cross a line in their relationship that could not be fixed until one of them came into alignment with the other.

Sadly, despite the fact that in the decade or so since the Atkins Carb Craze more and more research showing that low carb does indeed have benefits, in general, people still haven’t got the message.

Do you know how damned hard it is to find a yogurt that isn’t low-fat or no fat? It truly drives me batty.

I guarantee you - nearly every one is low fat and full of sugar

So while there have been some gains in the past decade – certainly the demonization of trans fats – for good reason – has taken hold with the general public and the food companies have responded by getting it out of a lot of products, there are still 100 products proudly labeled ‘low-fat’ compared to 1 product labeled ‘low-carb’.

So people who are comfortable in the wide part of the bell curve are going to have to deal with the social pressure of being an outsider – along with all the standard difficulties that come with a low carb diet – like finding products.

Even Gary Taubes mentioned this outsider feeling in an article he wrote for Prevention a few years ago:

 Perhaps the worst aspect of following a diet that most of your peers consider “a fad” is that you may often feel a compulsion to prove that you’re justified in doing so. This requires not just slimming down but actually living longer and remaining healthier than any of your friends. Because bad luck can be as much a factor here as genes and diet, you’re now in a delicate position, one that will last a lifetime (you hope). On the one hand, the temptation to treat your friends’ medical misfortunes as minor or even major victories is compelling, but you’ll have to keep this secret deeply hidden if you want to continue to enjoy their company. Then, of course, should anything unfortunate happen to you–”even moles in [your] front lawn,” as the New York physician Blake Donaldson, an early proponent of carbohydrate-restricted diets, noted in his 1961 memoirs–everyone will blame it on your diet.

Gary Taubes! The man has made this a career as well as his life’s work for over a decade and spent a good portion of that time doing serious research to justify his conclusions – and he still feels an outcast of sorts. Read the article in its entirety – it’s well worth it.

So…what’s the takeaway from all this?

I suppose if my hypothesis is correct that we can predict who has a better chance of succeeding on low carb and who has a better chance of failing on low carb by administering a psychological examination that tests for conformity. Doing a little research on tests of conformity brought me to The Asch Conformity Experiments.  Here’s a rendering of the test.

Participants were asked which line on the right matched the line on the left.

Easy, Right?

They were in a room with other people – all in on it with the researchers. When the group majority chose the wrong line, the actual research subject did so as well the majority of the time, meaning that a majority of people will go along with the group even if they are fully aware the group is wrong.

Do they do it to avoid conflict or because they want to conform? It doesn’t matter from our perspective – the Low Carb version of the Asch Conformity Experiment will probably see a lot of people bail not because low carb doesn’t work, but because they cannot cope with the social pressures from feeling the outcast.

Another takeaway is that we should be more generous to our brethren at the opposite end of the bell curve above – the vegans and vegetarians. Their way of life might be 180 degrees opposite of ours, but they go through many of the same issues we do in society, worrying about what is being served at some event so that they don’t go hungry for 6 hours, driving to 4 or 5 stores to find the ingredients they want – and then paying an arm and a leg for them, and having to endlessly endlessly explain their choices and their lifestyle to people who think a prefab microwaved TV dinner in plastic leaching chemicals into the food is ‘normal’.

© 2012, LowCarbConfidential.com

I have already stated – somewhere – that as part of my 2012 resolutions I was going to try to ditch the drink mixes.

the reason I’m writing about MiO, however, is because my resolutions are not necessarily your resolutions, and I thought you’d appreciate an honest review.

Prior to going on vacation, I wanted to bring some drink mix and stopped in the local grocery store – and this stuff was all that I could find that didn’t come in huge tubs or contain Nutrasweet.

I grabbed 2 – Berry Pomegranate and Strawberry Watermelon. They are little squirt bottles, and as long as I packed them in my luggage and not my carry-on, they probably wouldn’t be considered potential explosive devices by the TSA.

When in the Caribbean, we’re big fans of Badoit sparkling water – a brand I never saw in the US. Here’s a pic for the hell of it:

I drank a lot of the Badoit with these 2 mixes. I found 2 squirts were about right on the rocks. The 2 containers lasted me the entire 10-day trip, with only a little left over.

These containers are certainly more portable than the SodaStream soda mixes, that’s for sure, and as I’ve NEVER used the Sodamix the way SodaStream expects me to (pouring a cup full of flavoring into the liter bottle), this packaging concept works quite well for me. In fact, the MiO bottles are refillable (I’m sure they don’t want you to know that!) and I could see myself – if I were to continue to use the Sodastream soda mix, to actually pour the stuff into these little squeeze bottles and use it that way.

As to the flavors I got – I enjoyed them both. Maybe I liked the pomegranate a tad bit better.

I didn’t do a direct cost comparison. These were a bit pricy, but I don’t know if the stuff inside is more concentrated than the Sodastream stuff.

As to the ingredients – same artificial crap, more or less. I’m not faulting them there – it’s a drink mix – what do you expect?

You can check out their website, and their awesome, over-the-top advertising copy that seems like they cured cancer AND found a way to convert the simple intake of fluids into a religious experience.

http://www.kraftbrands.com/mio/index.html

I have chronicled my efforts at weight loss before. I don’t like the word ‘journey’ – it sounds so romantic: I imagine swelling movie music, perhaps standing nobly, chin up, on the deck of some beautiful ship, below a brilliant blue sky, sailing to some magical place, perhaps with a woman (in my case my wife, of course), standing beside me in an elegant (and slightly revealing) gown, hand in hand, beginning some pleasant and terribly interesting adventure.

This won’t be like that. Weight loss feels inexorably slow, and it’s frequently more boring than anything else. There’s a sense of aloneness at times, deprivation at others.

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like that – it’s exhilarating to fit into clothes that haven’t fit in a long time, getting a new wardrobe, or seeing the look of total shock and surprise on a friends face who hasn’t seen you in a while as they marvel at your lost weight like you parted the Red Sea in front of them, or perhaps levitated a car.

These moments are few and far between, however. They give you a warm and fuzzy feeling and a sense of pride.

And then it passes and you go back to the boredom, the hard work, the real, unseen effort it takes to lose significant weight. The stalls. The inexplicable weight gains when you’ve done everything right. Watching some thin person eat a second piece of chocolate cake in front of you while you sip an herbal tea, perhaps – and you wanting to drive a fork through their throat.

There is a quote I heard that I use frequently for other parts of my life that also applies to this:

In order to succeed, you need a cup of love, a barrel of understanding, and an ocean of patience.

So don’t call this a ‘journey’, OK?

I’ve decided to format this not by date, but rather by what I did to lose 10 lbs. Since I’m shooting for a 60 lb. loss, that means, if all goes as planned, there will be 6 installments – this introduction being the first. I chose this format because I think it will work better for me from a motivational standpoint, and it might be a little easier on my time constraints.

In between I’m sure I’ll write on other topics, but the weight loss march will be chronicled in these posts.

Ya gotta love this blog if you enjoy watching the best of intentions crumble in the face of a box of cookies.

Well, here we are – another year – 2011. 2010 was my worst year in all my seven years following a low carb lifestyle. In the past year, I gained 20 lbs.

I believe that at the beginning of 2010 I was 214. On Jan 1, 2011 I was 234.

I attribute this partly with just getting old. At 48, I’m starting to really feel my age. I’ve always considered moving my body a means to an end, not an end in itself. I’ve always felt my body was designed to move in order to perform a task – like crossing a room to pick up a bag of chips, for example. My favorite activities usually involve sitting quietly.

I felt a spiritual pride at losing 80 pounds on low carb without real exercise.

That was then.

I started exercising the day before Thanksgiving. I chose the treadmill not because I think it’s a great exercise – I don’t, really – but more as the easiest way for me to habituate myself to a daily exercise routine where I am least likely to hurt myself.

The notion is to get the habit instilled – then I’ll explore better alternatives to the treadmill.

That first day on the treadmill was awful – 25 minutes at 2.5 miles per hour left me winded to the point I could not talk, and got the heart rate up to the mid 130s. I more or less have kept this up since that day, and now that 25 minutes seems to go by a lot faster (tip: DON’T WATCH THE CLOCK!) and my heart rate barely goes above 120 – and that’s with the speed at 3.0 mph.

I also started a ketogenic low carb regime at the time and lost about 9 pounds before my vacation began. As for the fact that, as many times as I’ve tried to prove it wrong, I can’t lose weight and drink alcohol – so this was ditched as well.

Then I went on vacation for 10 days.  The place I went is NOT a place one goes for low carb cuisine and healthy life habits. I recall the waitress at the hotel asking if I would like a drink – it was 9am. We asked for tortilla chips for the kids, and she told us that, while alcohol was available at 9am, orders for food start at 11am. I pointed this interesting fact out to the waitress and she just smiled – it’s a very different place. It is not unusual to see people drinking beers as they walk the streets – and open containers of alcohol in cars are the norm.

I saw some cable installers in their van, their dual cup holders holding open beers. Hopefully, their install for the day went well.

I tried to adhere somewhat to my diet, frequently eating sardines for breakfast, and saving my intake of high carb stuff for only the best: crepes and croissants from a little hole in the wall place overlooking a small bay. Foie Gras on a hot baguette, a gourmet meal that cost a king’s ransom, but was so good it was not a meal, but an event – each course was explained, the ingredients detailed, and recommendations made how to best eat it and combine the flavors.

It wasn’t a meal as much as a performance – like a broadway show, yet done in a friendly, unpretentious, fashion.

I kept to my exercise at least every other day, and in a place where a liter of vodka costs less than a liter of orange juice, I had a glass of wine and half a beer the entire trip.

Bad news was I picked up smoking again – an entire carton there costs about what 2 packs do here. I told myself I’d only smoke on vacation…

I came back 1.5 pounds heavier, which I considered a success.

Then came the great Northeast blizzard, which gave me the opportunity to shovel my ass off for most of a day, helping to work off the excesses of a Xmas Eve and Xmas meal that negated any ketogenics, then go back to work. 2 more meals – New Years’ Eve and New Year’s day remained. I had been given a bottle of vodka by my boss as a gift, so that was part of the festivities. I don’t think Jan 1 is when you start your resolutions – I think Jan 2 should be. The gluttony is over then, and it makes one somewhat less the pain in the ass at family gatherings by refusing foods that were lovingly prepared, insulting the people who put all their effort and love into it.

On January 1, I also had my last cigarette. Did I say I would only do it on vacation? Ha! How I convinced myself of that, I’ll never fathom.

So today I did my exercise 3.0 mph, 10 degree incline 25 minutes. surprisingly, my heart rate stayed low – even after the ciggies, I still retained much of the conditioning I gained from a month of exercise, though I was a bit more winded.

Then I bought the nicotine lozenges – not for weight loss – it doesn’t work – believe me – I attribute THAT bone-headed idea to part of my weight gain this year, so it’s the end of the cigs.

Just a quick aside for people who don’t keep up with this blog: I thought to try an experiment last year. I thought to myself: if people who smoke gain weight when they stop – what if I use nicotine lozenges to curb appetite and lose weight?

I doesn’t work. I spent a lot of time and gained a lot of weight to learn that it does, in fact NOT help you lose weight, but when you stop, your weight goes up just like a smokers!

The past year also had some medication changes that might have contributed to the weight gain – as well as too much night eating, and a general lackadaisical approach to low carb – as well as a kind of fed-up-ness with everything that made me give up on low carb for a while – maybe the type of fed-up-ness with everything you might get stopping nicotine?!?

I also gave up taking vitamins completely. The reasons here are complex and will probably occupy a post some time in the near future, but my general thinking is that I should attempt to get my vitamins from food – which means buying and eating better quality food – with the thought that the greater food expense might be offset by the money saved not buying vitamins.

So here I am: older, wiser, and fatter – and ready for a fresh go at it.

It’s important to set goals – I’ve done it a lot – and every once in a great while, I follow through on them.

Why I might have a better shot at it this time?

Because this year I’ve felt my age more than ever – and I don’t like it one bit.

So my goal for the year is to be 174 by December 31, 2011. That’s 60 lbs. That’s a lot.

I think I have a chance this time because I am committing to exercise this year – not for weight loss as much as for general health. There is, of course, the side benefit of calorie burning when you exercise, but I’m not obsessing over that little display that pretends to tell you how many calories were burned when you run a certain time on the treadmill – I think that’s bullshit.

The exercise is a ‘move it or lose it’ proposition. I don’t want to be one of those folks in the electric scooters at the malls any time soon – and I think I’m approaching a narrowing window where I can’t put off taking better care of my body and need to add exercise to my low carb lifestyle.

There’s a lot more to this – call this the ‘back story’ for the coming year. I’ll document my progress (or lack thereof) – and for all the rest of you out there starting the new year attempting to stare down a seemingly impossible goal…you’re not alone.

Happy New Year.

I enjoyed this, my family enjoyed it, so this faux-recipe gets posted:

• 1 bag Trader Joe’s frozen scallops
• Old Bay Seasoning to taste – I used maybe 2 teaspoons
• 1/3 stick salted butter

After defrosting the scallops, I put the entire bag’s contents – including the wonderful scallop juices that I had previously thrown away – into a circular baking dish, placed pats of butter on top, and placed in a preheated oven at 400 degrees for 20 minutes.

Total time – including fumbling around to find the Old Bay Seasoning and trying to shoo my 4-year-old away from the oven while Daddy put the scallops in: 30 minutes.

Done like this, the scallops remain quite moist, and the remaining liquid becomes a condiment or a sauce for the scallops.

I ate it in a small bowl with the liquid, and the liquid was consumed entirely – it was so good.

A check of the nutritional data at NutritionData.com shows scallops to be more or less pure protein, with a nice complement of minerals, and no carbs. While they ring their hands over them being “high cholesterol”, most of my readers aren’t spooked by a little cholesterol, right?

Tasty, but artless.

I’m trying to take foods to a higher level – my thinking is that I should be preparing food that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to serve to guests. Treat the ingredients better, bring more flavor – more joy – out of eating – don’t just fill the pie-hole.

Here’s a simple enhancement to the Ricotta/Splenda concoction that I thought enhanced the pleasure greatly. While very low in carbs, it might cause problems if you’re shooting for induction, though it never caused me any issue.

• 1/2 cup Ricotta
• 2 tablespoons of granulated Splenda or 2 packets
• 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract
• 8 mint leaves, coarsely chopped or ripped in pieces

Prep is simple – mix. I do recommend using the amounts above as a guideline – start with less Splenda and the lesser amount of vanilla extract. Then sample and adjust until you’re satisfied with it.

I found that the vanilla enhanced all the other flavors, which would have allowed me to cut back on the Splenda. I want to use Splenda sparingly as I try to eat as natural as possible but I’m not going to be an obsessive fanatic about it.

The mint – oh, the mint! Be sure to go out of the way and get yourself some fresh mint and try this. What the bits of mint do is vary the taste experience. Each bite might or might not have the mint flavor and it adds a complexity to the flavors that really added a ‘wow’ to this simple dessert.

With a little work on the presentation – perhaps in a nice cup with the mint leaves sprinkled on top, I possibly could serve this to dinner guests.

During this time, the thoughts about what to do different this time led me back to something I rejected long ago, as well as something I wrote on 2 years ago. The first thought was on a post about food monotony, that is, food as a utility. It’s a notion I had that part of the problem about dieting is that you replace one food obsession – eating too much – with another type – eating the correct types and quantities. I speculated that just thinking about food less might be many naturally thin people’s way of keeping slim.

As an exercise to test this, I decided that to limit my food intake to some simple, basic – even boring choices – if I can get used to it, might make my ‘live-to-eat mindset’ shift more to an ‘eat-to-live’ mindset.

The second thought surrounded a long-reviled concept that I thought might just help: calorie-counting. When I went on low carb 6+ years ago and peeled off 80+ lbs., I didn’t count calories – I counted carbs – just like Atkins said. Well after a year of flatlining of my attempt to take off the 30 lbs I put on since my inital 80+ loss, I wondered if perhaps it might help to count the calories and the carbs.

Yeah – I know – heresy. In the low carb world, you don’t have to do that. But I think I might. The reason being: I think I’ve tricked myself into thinking that I’m doing low carb right – when I’m doing no such thing.

Part of it, I think, is the way the Atkins book is written. In it, he puts forth the proposition that you just count carbs – not calories – but then spends a lot of time discussing portion control. Isn’t portion control controlling calories?

In reflection, I was better at portion control the last time around. Perhaps because I was consciously working at low carb, learning the ropes, so to speak. Now I can live low carb effortlessly, unconsciously – but without conscious focus, I’m simply taking in too much calories.

And while I believe that Atkins does give you a metabolic advantage, it can only go so far.

So along with food monotony and calorie counting, I have one more arrow in my quiver: nicotine.

I wrote about nicotine last year – how effectively it can kill appetite – as well as how I didn’t lose weight using it. I’ve also written about this failure in greater detail recently, but haven’t published it yet. A conclusion I’ve come to is that I just need to come up with a better ‘dosing schedule’. I have to be clear on when to take it and when not to take it.

I have almost a year’s experience in how not to take it – I have some good ideas on how to take it to assist ketosis in appetite suppression.

So these concepts ran through my head from the beginning of the year until this past weekend. That’s it – I really didn’t act on them.

Then I got way sick Saturday night from some stomach flu that left me with a fever on Sunday. I slept most of the day, and food, coffee, and nicotine lozenges were out of the picture.

This involuntary fast was cleansing in a way. I survived deprivation of these items without feelings of withdrawal. That was reassuring, and gave me the impetus to try to implement the new regimen I’ve been kicking about since the New Year.

So Monday, I cut back my coffee consumption to 4 cups of black coffee a day – in the morning. If that still seems like a lot, I used to drink 8 cups every morning, then go to work and probably down another pot before the afternoon. So now I’m drinking a quarter of what I used to drink as little as a year and a half ago.

Tuesday I decided to try the food monotony bit by taking the approach of: food in work is ‘eat-to-live’. Try living on Atkins shakes and bars during the day. That’s it. You won’t starve, but it’s not ‘dining’. It’s sustenance – that’s it.

In the evening – eat light. Maybe a little less than recommended just to begin.

Lastly – use the nicotine lozenges sparingly, but at the right time.

So I did this. During the day on Tuesday, I had nothing but a shake in the AM with my vitamins, then a bar in the afternoon about 2pm – I try to adhere to the Atkins rule of ‘wait no longer than 6 hours to eat’. After the bar, I had a lozenge. When I got home, I ate very sparingly – just some bologna (one of my favorite comfort foods) and a piece of low carb bread. Right after I ate this, I had another lozenge.

While I need to swap in better food choices in the evening, at the least, conceptually, this first pass at a new approach seemed successful. I’m drinking half the coffee, one-third of the nicotine, and probably less than half the calories. Let’s try this another day and see where the flaws in my thinking lie.

Irvingia – this subject took position 1,2,3,5,6 and 9. Jeez Louise! I suppose that I became something of a hub of info on this supplement that was touted so highly as a powerful weight loss aid in 2009. I suppose that this is because I was one of the first people to hear about it and try it.

It didn’t do a darn thing for me, nor many of the people who posted their experiences – and it came out that even if it did work, it didn’t work with low carb diets.

I suppose that this is indicative of just how many people are looking for some magic bullet to weight loss. Sorry to say, I don’t think you’ll find it in a supplement at present.

# 4 – Atkins Induction – Observations On My First Few Days – I wrote this one in July of 2007 and it appears to be a big fave. I’ve even referenced it myself on those occasion where I had been carbing out for a while and decided to back to low carb full bore.

# 7 - Recipe – World’s Easiest Low Carb Crock Pot Chicken – OK – this recipe *is* pretty good, but its relative popularity is strange. Why is there such a burning desire for low carb crock pot chicken? Another one from 2007 that seems to never lose it’s popularity.

#8 - The Alcohol Stall – Does Liquor Really Impede Low Carb Weight Loss? – This was not written by me, but by Megamas, the nom de plume of a fellow who wrote a number of articles for this blog in 2008. Atkins and alcohol is apparently a popular subject – most likely because a low carb diet is the only diet that even entertains the possibility that you can lose weight and still drink. Sadly, for those of you who like to put a few back, all evidence points to the fact that alcohol does stall you. Most people report being able to maintain existing weight loss, but they can’t peel off the pounds when tossing back a few.

Now having said that, this comment on the post does hold out a shred of hope – and I myself had written about The Drinking Man’s Diet (#19 on the top posts for 2009) that he references – a low carb diet from the early 1960s. I’ve never read the book, though it might be worth buying if only to add to my low carb reference library. As I stated in my post, I don’t think it would work for me. The fellow who wrote the book, the famous photographer Robert Cameron died in 2009 at the age of 98. He certainly must have buried a lot of the doctors that told him his diet was dangerous.

His book had been re-released a few years ago when I wrote the post, but it seems gone from Amazon. Shame. There’s another by the same name but with different authors, which confuses the Hell out of me at present, but I will resist the urge to investigate further.

#9 - How You Feel When Starting Atkins Induction – I’d call this a good companion piece to #4 listed above. Bookends for the first-time low carber.

#10 – Recipe- Chocolate Ricotta Dessert – It’s somewhat of a travesty when I use the term ‘recipe’ for some of the concoctions I come up with, so I am always surprised when one of these concoctions becomes popular. I suppose this one became so because it’s sweet, easy and tasty.

As always, I am shocked and amazed that anyone would bother reading this stuff that I write in the wee hours of the morning, but it does help make it worth the while.

Thanks.

• 3 or 4 chicken thighs – I get mine ‘IQF’ – ‘Individually Quick Frozen’, which means I pull a bag out of the freezer, grab some thighs, and I’m done. Trader Joe’s has great thighs.
• Olive oil
• Poultry seasoning – this is a pre-mixed seasoning that prevent you from having to think about it. I used a Trader Joes no-salt version of the stuff
• Salt

Preheat oven to 400. Place thighs on a cookie sheet that’s been sprayed with non-stick spray. Drizzle olive oil over the thighs, sprinkle a liberal amount of the seasoning over the olive-oil-covered thighs, then add a bit of salt.

Place in oven for 25 minutes. Optional: set oven to broil for 5-7 additional minutes.

Chicken thighs have more flavor than breasts because of the higher fat content. They also tend to be less dry. They are also typically cheaper, since the average person’s fear of fat keeps the cost of thighs down.

The flavor can sometimes be a bit…strong, for lack of a better word, but this way of preparing them gave them a terrific flavor.

Safe for induction, a great meal for folks just starting Atkins, and a nearly idiot-proof recipe. The only thing that can go wrong is that you forget to turn off the oven and burn down the house.

I can’t help you there.