• 1 lb. grass-fed beef
• 2 yellow onions
• 12 oz. chopped tomatoes
• 1 pound frozen chopped kale
• 8 teaspoons Trader Joe’s Taco Seasoning
• 4 tablespoons butter

In a large pan I melted the butter while I haphazardly chopped the onions – it was too early for finesse. I threw the onions in and let them cook on high while I cleaned up the mess from the onions. Cleanup is part of every project, I tell my daughter, ad nauseam, and she can complete the phrase, along with a roll of her eyes, almost before I start saying it.

Parents are so lame.

Anyway, digression aside, I then threw in the beef and broke it up and let that cook until it had formed into nice-sized beef bits and had browned here and there. The addition of the butter inhibits the browning a bit because of the volume of liquid, but I just loves me my butter.

Next went in the chopped tomatoes, then the kale. I stirred these in until the kale had warmed and softened in the heat, then added the taco seasoning. I originally tried 4 teaspoons, but it wasn’t enough, so I bumped it to 8.

A few good stirs to get the seasoning infused throughout the dish, and I set the flame to low and let it simmer for 20 minutes.

The problem with lunch at work is that, like people in hospitals or on airplanes, you are in a sense, a captive audience. You gotta eat what you got in front of you. There’s no fridge stocked with goodies in case you change your mind about what you brought in the morning.

I hadn’t tasted what I made, except to adjust the seasoning, so I wasn’t sure if this was going to be something really enjoyable, or just another experiment that I never tried again.

My verdict was: Damn! This is pretty good. Kale is supposed to be good for you precisely because of its strong, bitter flavor. That makes kale a bit of a challenge for people new to the vegetable. This dish, with the taco seasonings blending with the kale, brought out all the positive flavors of the kale and mellowed the bitterness.

For those of you trying to get in or stay in ketosis as I am at the present, this didn’t cause any issues – consider this ‘Induction -Friendly’.

This one’s a keeper – I’ll have to do it 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.

• 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

Image credit: The wonderful people at Despair.com

On Christmas Day, 2011, I ran out of nicotine lozenges. That was it. It’s over. A very expensive and annoying addiction to nicotine lozenges, started nearly 3 years ago when I got this hare-brained idea that: if people who stop smoking gain weight because they don’t have nicotine, can people lose weight if they take nicotine?

It took thousands of dollars and a nasty addiction to the stuff – including a delightful panic attack – to come to the conclusion: Nicotine lozenges will not help you lose weight. Don’t even try.

I am spelling this out because I still get traffic to the posts where I wrote about this in my enthusiastic, early trials on the stuff. While it did have an early effect of helping to stop overeating, the addictive nature of nicotine began to overshadow the endeavor as the effect on overeating diminished, leaving me with no positive effect on my weight loss – and an expensive addiction to boot.

Maybe you want to try anyway.

Like Dirty Harry, all I can say is: “do you feel lucky?” Substitute nicotine for 44 magnum in the clip that follows.

© 2012, LowCarbConfidential.com

• 1 large head of cauliflower
• 2 whole bunches of scallions – yes – bunches
• salt
• 4 cups of water
• pepper
• 1 cup heavy cream

In a deep cooking pot, place the chopped scallions and the chopped up cauliflower head in 4 cups of water and bring to a boil, then simmer for a half hour.

Next, get out the handy immersion blender. A quick digression: while food processors are great, unless you’re a TV chef that has some poor intern to do your dishes for you, they are a pain in the ass to clean. You can find yourself using it for 2 minutes and cleaning it for 10. The immersion blender tackles a lot of the things a food processor is used for and cleaning is a breeze – I couldn’t live without my immersion blender. Just don’t clean it while it’s plugged in!

Be patient while you blend, fishing out all the little florets that missed the blades. It will turn a nice shade of light green. If you ignored my instructions to do this in a deep pot and did it in a shallow pot, be prepared to clean scallion-encrusted cauliflower goo off your walls and stove.

Next, with the heat off, stir in the cream.

Now it’s a matter of tasting. Depending on your feelings about salt, you might want a lot or a little. I ended up putting in way more than I expected, but the outcome was awesome – it brought out the flavor without overpowering it. I also added pepper.

I let that combo simmer a bit more, just to warm the cream – not too long, maybe 5 minutes.

Nothing but cream and healthy carbs here. No reason I can see why this wouldn’t be induction-friendly.

The reviews were generally positive. Given my crock pot chicken curry debacle, perhaps expectations aren’t high right now. The primary complaints were that it needing more varied seasoning – my older daughter added some additional spices to hers. That’s a philosophical issue, as one could argue I was trying to bring out the flavors of the ingedients and not tart them up with a spectrum of other flavor notes.

On another criticism I must agree: it was a bit too watery. It wasn’t bad, mind you – we just like thicker soups. I will try this again and probably add 3 cups of water rather than 4.

I could also see myself adding other flavor and texture notes in the future. Perhaps some clams and diced turnips to make a faux clam chowder? Maybe some bacon?

Sounds good to me.

I can also report that on the day after, the leftover soup has mostly disappeared, a good indication to me that the stuff I made is good.

I’ll have to try this one again

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

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

This is one of my go-to recipes since conjuring it up in October, 2011. I’ve made it no less than a half-dozen times.

Now, however, I have made a resolution for the year to ditch artificial sweeteners, and have done well – but this recipe, I think, does need some sweet.

A reader recommended stevia, which I had heard of, but had heard some worrisome studies had come out about possible health effects. ‘Natural’ does not always mean safe, after all. I did a bit of research, however, and found this was based on some early, flawed studies – and I wasn’t going to be using a LOT of the stuff – the only thing I can think of at present I’d use it in is the pumpkin muffins.

I’ve modified the recipe here and there – here’s the most recent version:

• 6 eggs
• 1 cup coconut flour
• 1 can pumpkin
• 40 drops Whole Foods Stevia extract
• 2 tablespoons cinnamon
• 2 tablespoons nutmeg
• 1 7oz. tub of Fage plain yogurt (not low-fat)
• 1 cup cranberries

I put this in a 350 degree oven for 40 minutes – the tops are slightly browned by that time. This makes about 14 of these things shown in the picture above.

Honestly, this last batch could have used even more sweetness. 40 drops of stevia was replacing 10-12 drops of EZ-Sweetz, and it isn’t enough to balance the tartness of the cranberries. Next time I’m going to add more stevia

The addition of the yogurt makes them less dry – the biggest complaint from the family, but these things can’t be compared to a traditional muffin which rises and becomes light and fluffy. These are dense little balls (I use an ice cream scoop to put them on the baking tray) that you can space as close together as you like because they won’t rise – there’s nothing in them that can be prompted to rise – and they are dense enough to use to defend oneself if attacked.

On the other hand, they are filling, and keep me satisfied for hours.

Are these a crowd-pleaser? Nope. Even sweeter, a palate used to a lot of sweets won’t find these alluring. This might be one of those recipes better for people with less of a sweet tooth, that like tartness. Honestly, I had to acquire a taste for the cranberries tartness. Family won’t go near ‘em.

These are good warm with butter on them. Me – I eat them as breakfast usually, or if I need a cake substitute.

© 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?