Designing Your Appetite

Some days when I am crankier than usual, there is something that really bugs me about, in general, "the low carb world" that I see online. (Meaning, the overall 'social result' of community.) Do you ever notice this?

It's this: so many people just want to eat crap.

If you tell them they can't have crappy carbs, they instantly start doing everything they can to reproduce the crap in a lowcarb fashion.

Surely this must be what inspired all those horrible frankenfood pseudo-lowcarb abominations that bombed in the grocery world (and gave the erroneous impression to marketers that "low-carb is dead" as a result).

I found that when I quit eating things breaded, for example, I quit needing to find semi-lowcarb grain-based specialty-foods for breading stuff. This matters because, even though you can do it, most the time it means you use the majority of your daily carb on lowcarb bread crumbs or carbquik instead of on something actually good for you like veggies. (Or at least almonds or seeds or cheese or something.)

If it were just a little in a muffin batch or meatloaf it'd be one thing, but foods with major elements that are based on crappy food have more than one problem.

I've nothing against creative food. It's one of my personal focii in fact. And I've nothing against reproducing highcarb food in lowcarb ways really, that's natural. Except that some things, you really cannot produce in a lowcarb way without either getting into highly processed stuff or ...

Or without keeping your taste for it. If despite being lowcarb, I continued to eat tacos instead of taco salad, burgers instead of pattymelts, and breaded chicken instead of baked, roasted, crocked, parm'd, grilled chicken, then I would still WANT those things.

A great deal of going-off-lowcarb seems to hinge on the person feeling like there is something that is high-carb that they just aren't getting. Over time, I've come to feel that in fact, the problem is not that there is something they aren't getting. The problem is that they have not adapted to "wanting what they have."

Think of it like an appetite for sex -- food being related. ;-) A man might not have the buxom blonde coworker he thinks is sexy, but that is only an issue if he really wants her. If he is happy with his woman, he won't CARE that he doesn't/can't have the other one; it may be eye-candy just like some high-carb foods are, sure, but it's just no big deal and there is no real desire that would make him give up what he has.

Well I think it's kinda similar with food. If a person keeps eating "crap-LIKE" foods, they continue their appetite for crap food. Then when someone goes, "Hey, here's some crap food!" they eventually think, "Wow, that looks great, and it's even more familiar-tasting than the crap-LIKE food I've been faking on lowcarb!"

But if you adapt people to eating real food in a way that is healthy, and they learn to like real food made healthily, then they have far less reason to "go off" lowcarb. They don't feel like they're "missing or faking" a burger bun with lettuce. They don't feel like they're missing a tortilla when they eat the ingredients as a hot plate. They don't feel like they're missing breading when they eating roasted chicken.

And eventually, they will breed an appetite, and a FAMILIARITY, with good food, and reduce both appetite and familiarity with the crap. Familiarity is one of the big issues too.

So, some days it just irks me to see so many trying to stuff highcarb into lowcarb. Crap is crap. I don't care if Wheat Protein Isolate and Sweetzfree and ThickNThin made it possible to just barely squeeze that food through the digestive system as "a mostly low-carb ECC" value. That only means that
(a) all those carbs someone could have eaten in life-giving food, they didn't, and
(b) they continue their familiarity with that food, and
(c) they continue their appetite for food that tastes like that, and
(d) they continue their dependence on specialty foods the local grocery likely doesn't have or that cost more.

I'm not saying we can't use high-carb or specialty-stuff. I do. I'm just saying that sometimes I see people who so overwhelm their food with it, either so often, or so overwhelmingly in a given dish, that the reality is, they are NOT "adapting to eating lowcarb as a lifestyle," they are instead, "attempting to temporarily adapt lowcarb eating to be just like the crappy highcarb eating they always did, except the carbs, and a sense of 'fake/not as good'."

Until people learn to LIKE lowcarb well enough that they have NO REASON to be "so tempted by that buxom blonde breaded-fried chicken that they "fall off the wagon" and have some, lowcarb is going to BE a wagon that they can fall off.

Because that is really the point: men don't sleep with the secretary because they want her, they sleep with her because they have lost interest or concern for their wife. So the reality is that the reason for the wandering-into-badlands is about his relationship with his wife and how he feels about that. If you see what I mean. Well if your relationship with your lowcarb food is great, you have no reason to feel you "need" high-carb food. Because it isn't about what you don't have, it's about how well you like and are comfortable with what you DO have.

When you can eat a piece of roasted chicken, a plain hamburger patty, some stir fried broccoli, and be genuinely happy for it -- love it, have it be your most familiar food, have it be something your body learns to have an appetite for -- lowcarb is no longer HARD. It's easy and constant and familiar.

Anything that's hard, is usually temporary. So it matters.

That is my soapbox for the night!

PJ