Irreconcilable Lowcarb Differences

I'm gradually coming to believe that eating lowcarb isn't remotely difficult, in general. Dealing with the people around you, related to your eating lowcarb, is another story.

There's the endless advice, even from people overweight--as long as someone is thinner than you are, they feel that bestows expertise. People who want you to eat dessert so they'll feel better doing so. People who want to call lowcarbing a 'fad' and lecture you about how 'too much protein hurts you!' 'cause they saw it on TV. Not like they have any clue how much is needed, is too much, is recommended, etc. Between absurd rudeness and social stupidity, it's amazing I've gotten through eating in restaurants and other homes for holidays as often as I have.

The only small favor that weighing nearly 500lbs has done me is that unlike being 30-100lbs overweight, at least once I gained enough, I no longer had men constantly coming on to me with the memorable line that they'd like to "work it off me" -- snort! There's romance. Or the ones who assured me up front they like 'that kind of woman'. Oh where's my bucket. Please.


But of all the BS I've gotten socially over the last 15 years of being really severely obese, I don't think anything has been as difficult to deal with as the reaction (or lack of it) to my finding a way of eating that would work and going on the plan to make it happen.

My husband is responsible for the food, since I work and whatever he makes in his sometimes computer work, he doesn't contribute to the family (an issue I am suddenly about to have An Issue With. Is this my new energy, from eating lowcarb, showing its head?). He was perfectly happy to arrange McDonald's or frozen taquitos and once in awhile cook something. He has made a few lowcarb dinners at my request. But otherwise, there is always some reason that he is too busy to cook, or that he can't arrange for food at any other times, or that he does the shopping but he can't keep meat in the house, or I buy it and stick it in the chest freezer in the garage and he promptly piles so much junk on top of it it can't be opened.

I pay for a maid to come in every week and make the entire house spotless, especially the kitchen. I wash, rinse and put in the drainer or put away every dish I use for anything. So he is the only one cooking stuff. And he only cooks maybe 3x a week, usually when nagged, often not ready till 9pm. Yet the kitchen is always a disaster, I mean terrible. Simply wanting to make a protein shake requires courage and a strong stomach (and flying-bug-killer) to enter. So now I am lowcarb... and I need to make food for myself. I go into the kitchen and it's revolting. He says I am 'easily grossed out'. Yes. I am.

F***ing communism. I swear I sometimes think growing up under it (he escaped from Czech when the iron curtain was in place) created some kind of welfare mentality for life.

Lowcarb has made me realize something. My lack of energy, my despair at how exhausting it is to drag this whale-sized body around, my fear of not being able to do things I need to do -- from getting something off a high shelf (try standing on a chair at my weight!) to just shopping or taking out the trash -- it has profoundly impacted my decisions in life.

I have decided that now that lowcarb has given me the energy to care, the energy to be indignant, I'm going to do something about it. I am taking it back. It is MY HOUSE. As of now the kitchen is MINE. I finally have the energy to do some cooking and cleaning and what I lack, my ten year old daughter is going to learn to help with so we can pull it off.

I feel like he has contributed to the weight gain I had over the last 1.5 years, to the chronic asthma from foods he knows I can't eat without gluten-response but makes for me anyway because it's easier to make that than worry about it. I wouldn't make him food he responded that way to. He just doesn't care. I was on low-carb when he arrived, I'd lost 70lbs and felt great, but with his insisting on filling the house and the kid and dinners with carb-junk, going out a lot so I was always trying to pick-around stuff with too many carbs, gradually sent my carb count up until cravings overwhelmed me and one night I went off the wagon, and only climbed back on 56 lbs to re-lose later. He doesn't spend any time with the kid, either, doesn't even talk to her unless he's griping, and that's the only reason I agreed he could come back here. I am fed up.

I have decided that I am going to cook food that is lowcarb. And he and the daughter -- both of whom are overweight! -- are going to eat it, or they can starve. I pay the rent and buy the food. I care what they like, but my surviving to care is more important right now, in my opinion, than their right to live on junkfood. If he wants to have other food he can buy it with his own money.

I can't believe that after five years separated (and nearly five years of 'just roommates' prior) he comes back and hasn't paid a dime of rent in 16 months, didn't even buy his kid a birthday present, doesn't help with anything. He waters the garden, he feeds the cats, and once in a while he cooks. Is this worth putting up with him so his kid can have a dad? Who lives here but totally ignores her anyway, just messes up the house and leeches my money? I don't think so.

I'm not so scared anymore. I don't feel afraid that the 'challenge' of merely going to the store to buy food will overwhelm me. Thanks to lowcarb and immediate weight loss, I feel like I am capable of what is needed. Not as much as I want, but I'm working on that. Definitely enough.

My parents think that since I am fat, I should be thankful that 'any man will have me'. Have me! Ha! Like I'm not the one who makes the living. I think my parents' psychology about fat has sort of influenced me in a way I don't like. I am taking THAT back too. I deserve a healthy home situation, not dysfunction, because I'm a good person. Weight has nothing to do with it. What other people think means jack to me. I deserve better.

I am sure that in retrospect he will think that lowcarb was the downfall of our situation. I can hear it now. "She went on this diet and then just totally wigged out!"

I call it a low-carb side-effect: finally, I have just enough new energy to insist on what I want from life. Hmmmn. I'd say that's one of the good side effects, wouldn't you.
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Lowcarb and Learning Theory

"Learning theory" is a phrase used to describe the (ongoing, ever-evolving) results of a field of study about how humans perceive, process, and respond to information. It relates to what causes change in the human based on information processing (for better or worse).

As a layman's paraphrase of the generic basics for an example, let us say that the "action" we wish to 'train' is throwing a basketball, aiming to get it through the hoop.

• If you provide accurate feedback to a human following an action, the body/mind perceiving the information -- such as "when you threw it exactly like that, it went in" or "when you threw it exactly like that, it bounced off the rim to the left" -- will be able to "learn" from this. The feedback is corrective or confirming, both of which 'teach' us. So: practice improves most anything, we all know this.
• If you provide inaccurate feedback to a human following an action, the body/mind will learn just as well -- it's simply that what it learns is wrong. For example, if a basketball hoop were specially designed to ever-so-slightly move to the left just after the ball left your hands for the throw, eventually you would use that "corrective" information and begin throwing the ball slightly to the left, in order to succeed.
• If you provide feedback that is highly negative, e.g., every time you throw a basketball someone comes and punches you in the head, then you create an aversion effect, where mysteriously you seem to be losing your desire to shoot hoops (I wonder why!).
• If you don't provide ANY feedback following an action, or if you provide feedback that does not directly relate to the goal-attempt of the action, eventually you train-out the behavior. If barking at the moon did not get you strawberries, you'd have no reason to do it, and when you wanted strawberries that is not an urge you'd have, as it'd be unrelated to your getting them.

The lack of feedback, and even moreso, "inconsistent" feedback -- sometimes accurate, sometimes wrong, sometimes none, sometimes negative -- can literally train-out a quality or skill. I believe this is called an Extinction Paradigm. You have basically extinguished that tendency or skillset in the human.

Dr. Batmanghelidj, author of Your Body's Many Cries for Water, has an interesting idea. He believes that our culture, over time, feeding ourselves and our children drinks that are not water---the body doesn't by nature know anything but water--we have programmed-out our own innate thirst-reflex. He suggests that when the body asks for water and we give it other stuff, from slightly-off (like koolaid or coffee) to massively-off (like sodas), the body eventually is "entrained" to not ask for water because it isn't going to get it.

So eventually, the body quits asking. If a desire for clean water brings the minor poison of a soft drink cola, that is not only an inaccurate feedback for 'thirsty for water', it's actually a 'negative' aversion feedback.

He believes that over time, we become dehydrated literally to the cellular level. As it is gradual and has been happening over such a long time, we are oblivious to it. All the cells make do with a little less eventually, until finally, side effects start showing up, and then major problems.

He described a linear serious of ailments that can result from chronic dehydration, immensely aggravated by 'fiber' supplements that allegedly deal with the symptoms that dehydration caused in the first place, but leech massive water from the body when used, making it worse, making one yet-more dependent on them. I might have been more skeptical about his book except that my father has had every single one of the symptoms and ailments he described, in exactly the same order. I mean what are the odds. Most of these are things that the medical system has no good explanation for the causation of, except "bad luck."

By the time the body finally asks for water, it is only because it is so incredibly desperate for it, that it is simply is doing anything it can, no matter that the approach seldom works, to try and get your attention to get some.

The doc believes that replenishing the body all the way to the cellular level takes several months of drinking sufficient water daily. Like sleep, it is not something you can just make up all at once.

Soda is NOT water despite that it has water in it. It has to do with how the body processes the water -- he has nice little diagrams and simple explanations that even I was capable of understanding. (Although I felt he attributed too much to dehydration, in terms of health problems, aside from that I felt it was a book well worth reading.)


So, let's look at food. We need nutrients and protein most of all. Our body gets hungry. It starts in childhood, with many. And so we feed it -- mac&cheese? A happy meal with fries and coke? At best, that is somewhere between inaccurate feedback and non-feedback if it doesn't have the nutrients we needed. At worst, given the content of the food and affect on the body, it may be actual aversion training!

Not on a conscious level though. On a conscious level, we love sweet, we feel happy, we're inundated with marketing, McDonald's has the Star-Wars toys!, and the sheer mass quantity of sugar/carbs in the meal makes us feel "up-up-up!", while the drink is cold and fizzy (feel the burn! yeah!). Consciously we're getting nothing but positive feedback -- at first.

Unfortunately, the negative feedback of exhaustion, allergies/asthma, and more don't come until later, and as learning theory studies have always shown, the sooner the feedback, the greater the likelihood of learning from it. So, 30 minutes or an hour later when your blood sugar might drop is too late for that feedback to do any good for the conscious mind; we don't necessarily even correlate the two events. Our meal is already long past and forgotten by then.

So at a subconscious level, we have a body-function that eventually is trained out of bothering to really ask for what it wants because it doesn't get it, or seldom, and often gets something quite bad if it dares ask. No different than a family with an alcoholic angry parent, eventually the child, not sure if they'll get a kindness, ignored, or often abuse, in response to a question, is just going to avoid asking questions at all. So our bodies learn to avoid asking for what they want.

And at a conscious level, we have a body-psychology that is eventually trained into craving sugar, carbs, cold fizzy drinks, hot coffee, and the feeling of comfortable oversatiation that only eating too much bread-based carbs can give you.

We force the dissociation between body and mind from a young age.


The good doc Batman believes that you can rehydrate your body, heal it, and that gradually when you drink a lot more water regularly, your thirst -- for water, not soda or coffee -- will actually begin to gradually return. I have experienced this myself. It's not easy to do since in my case I didn't like water. I liked soda. But after drinking at least 3qts of water a day for about 10 days, the actual thirst-response started coming back. I started getting thirsty far more often (despite all that water!) and specifically for water, not sugary-carbonated junk.

I correlate this with the fact that some lowcarb docs note that insulin resistance can be lessened, and even Type 2 diabetes lessened greatly, as one eats low-carb and adequate-protein and nutrients finally, and the body gradually begins to heal.

(Not, mind you, that it's ever going to revert to what we think of as normalcy, as LC Dave points out.)


I am coming to believe that the basics of human learning theory are, unintentionally perhaps, working against us in our culture from the moment we start eating solid foods.

Some think -- rightly I suspect -- that placing importance on food such as a 'reward' is the wrong message to send to oneself, as it ties into the "emotional" issues with eating.

But on the other hand, food is central to physiological survival, and since the dawn of time man's been generally obsessed with it for necessary reasons. We may not want to have eating tied to our psychology, but the fact is--it is. I don't think we can wish that away. I think it's hard-wired into our biology, even if every human culture didn't steep its people in it.

So my armchair philosophy for the day goes something like this:

• The more that we make lowcarb food important to ourselves;
• the more enjoyment we get from eating it;
• the more positive feedback we get from self or others from experimenting with it, cooking it, sharing with others about it, etc;
• the more we literally create a 'celebration of food' gestalt with lowcarb eating;
• then the more we are working to "correct and re-adjust" the psychology about food.

If we eat what we don't much like or what bores us because we "should," we are not only NOT working to "correct" our psychology (as much as our insulin-response), we are actually contributing in a negative way to that level of things.

And it seems to me that while we are healing ourselves, we have to consider the mind as well as the body. Our reaction to food goes from the most primal survival level to the most abstracted marketing inference: food doesn't just move through us, it moves us through and through.

So here's to creative culinary efforts; to sharing recipes and social bonding over that; to learning to enjoy food preparation; and to making food something special. Drink that protein shake in a princess goblet. Make that chicken with peppers dish or array of veggies and deviled eggs pretty on the plate, it can be done. Those are small ritual elements, but it's more our effort to pursue them, to take the time to make food a luxury for us, that matters.

Make lowcarb food for the mind and heart, as well as the body.

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The Yum-Factor and Lowcarb Obsession

When you look at humans in tribal environments, you see that aside from sleep, human rituals and care of the young, nearly all their time is spent working on getting food or in some way dealing with food. For eons with humans, in terms of what one's time and mind are focused on, there has been a dominant obsession with food. NOT as a 'concept', outside of Christmas carols, but as a direct relationship to what you were going to put in your body. The two things -- food, and what goes in your body -- were not separate.

Nowdays, it's hard to be bothered with food. We often rush from the moment we get up and get kids to school and get ready for work and work all day and do errands afterwards and outside of our lunch hour or whatever we arrange for dinner, usually we are paying no attention to food. When we do put food in our bodies, it is often based on available time and available energy to prepare, or what is in arm's reach, or what someone else likes (a kid, mate, etc.).

This is no small issue. Looking at the protein requirements for the average person, and at what they actually eat, I'm willing to bet that most people don't eat anywhere near enough protein. So they don't have sufficient energy.

When you have less energy, you get less exercise because you haven't the gumption to get up and go. When you get less exercise and you're lower in energy you're more likely to eat carbs because carbs are energy-in-food. Protein is like power that our body translates into energy internally. Carbs are like external-energy we're pulling into us to help.

Too many carbs, not enough exercise, lead to weight gain and eventually to insulin resistance, which inevitably amplifies things into more weight gain, which leads to vastly less energy for obvious carrying-it-around reasons, so more craving for carbs to support the body and more insulin resistance and more weight gain -- it's the modern insulin-hamster-wheel of obesity.

So if you 'track it back', it seems that a great deal of all the carb-obsessed, nutritionally-deficient, exercise-inhibited problems in our culture, all start at the doorstep of insufficient protein.

Which means if I'm lowcarbing and not getting enough protein, that's a big deal.


Now, not to be obvious, but in order to get protein, ya gotta EAT. Which I at least won't do unless I like the taste of what I'm eating. So lowcarb better be yummy or I'm not lowcarbing, I'm fasting.


I suspect the lean-body-mass starvation that is chronic throughout much of human life in our culture, due to protein deficiency, may well contribute to a whole host of medical (and possibly even mental and social) problems far more extreme than just obesity.

Unlike every "natural" culture of humans, who for survival are forced to put a huge emphasis on the acquisition, preparation and storage of food, many people pay incredibly little attention to the detail of the food we put in our bodies.

But it seems almost inbred to humans since the dawn of time, that food's an obsession with us. And it seems marketing takes advantage of this. You'd never know we weren't obsessed with food to look at any form of marketing! Magazines and stores and TVs are nearly overwhelmed by the obsession with food. Even the obsession with beauty, health and sex fall second to the obsession with food. (Well, the sex obsession may be catching up, particularly as men become a higher % of the population doing even grocery and furniture shopping.)

So, oddly, it's as if we are still obsessed about food as a concept, we're just not really obsessed with the food we put in our bodies.

It's a form of dissociation.


If we asked our body what it wanted to eat, it would probably give us sexy dreams about steak or fish, broccoli and avocados, strawberries and cold clear water. Somehow, I doubt that apple pie, hershey bars and french fries are of any interest to the body -- and to the degree they are chemically bad for the body, even harmful, quite the opposite.

But they're of huge interest to our brain. Why? Because we've been indoctrinated with an obsession about the concept of food, devoid of the context of what we actually put in our mouths.

They're of huge interest to our palate as well. Why? Because we've been eating that way much of our life, in some cases when our parents ate badly all our lives, and we've learned to associate that food with 'getting energy' we lack, with positive reward from our parents, with sex and fun and other abstracted pleasures in a lifetime subjected to marketing.


Some people feel they have emotional reasons for eating. Personally, I think nearly everybody has emotional reasons for eating (or sometimes for not-eating, which is really the same issue just a different reaction), because nobody in our culture who hasn't grown up in the closet could have avoided the pervasive influence, since early childhood, of the many messages about and associations with food.

If Jane is thin and eats when she's upset, nobody even notices. Nobody cares. Jane doesn't care. She's thin, why should she care? But if John is obese and he eats when he's upset, it's considered a major psychological problem.

If this is a problem, I'd suggest it's a problem that the vast majority of our culture has -- it's simply that we only notice it or care about it when the metabolism of the individual fails to "compensate" for that.


Since I went back to a lowcarb way of eating, I've been almost forced to obsess on the food I put in my mouth. I rather have to, because my normal way of eating is completely different.

To start with, prior to lowcarb, I often ate only one meal late in the day, that's been my norm for decades. Secondly, whatever I ate was carb-laden and too much (although almost any mega-carb meal is 'too much' unless you're about to work out hard or run a marathon). My family's idea of food has been fast-food or packaged food with an occasional home cooked meal--rarely. I work and my husband handles the food, animals and garden, and we share the kid duties. He really isn't interested in cooking every night, let alone to deal with daytime food, let alone even more than that, for arranging snacks or whatever.

This makes my getting sufficient protein very difficult -- it's even difficult to get enough calories, unless I eat something massively high in fat. It means I need to take off work (I work from home, more than 8 hours a day) and go do something about my food.


I am pretty stubborn about food. I can be hungry, and standing looking at a refrigerator stuffed with wonderful fresh foods, and if I don't feel like eating those foods, I will go hungry and walk away. I'd rather be hungry than eat what I don't like or don't feel like. Maybe this means that my psychology has more sway with me than my body... I think that would probably be a fair statement.

I have to like the food that I am eating or I'm not going to eat it, period. Maybe if my parents had forced more veggies on me I'd be different, who knows. I'm finicky as hell. I tend to obsess on a certain food and eat it constantly and then am totally sick of it and can't eat it for a long time. I get weary of foods easily and really need variety. I behave similarly with other subjects, like music, and personal interests, so I think some of this is just personality.

And perhaps because of my lifetime of eating, my body-psychology (not function) feels a genuine need for something that at least can function-as breadish foods (tortillas and bread) since a ton of other food options -- variety! -- open up when you have those.

And sometimes, I want sweets. Do I need them? My body doesn't. My mind apparently does. And maybe that will change. But right now, pretending that is not so would only make me feel deprived and result in me eventually eating off-plan carby-crap that would blow it for me.

So staying on lowcarb is profoundly dependent on my ability to make foods that I like, and enough variety of them that I can stand it. Including breadish stuff and sweets.


There is a good chunk of the lowcarb world online that is fiercely dedicated to the meat-eggs obsession. And it works for 'em, I'm telling you, most of these people drop weight the way I can drop money at amazon.com -- so they've got a lot of leverage for respecting their opinion.

But I can't eat like that. Not sure I can afford it for one. And the "heavy darkness inside me" when I do that is something I really dislike. And I don't have time for the required cooking, for another. And I just flat out can't stand it! Perhaps I will evolve into some kind of paleolithic hunter who really just wants to eat meat and steal eggs from nests and forage for roots and berries, but it certainly isn't that way right now.

Right now, if I'm going to eat twice a day -- let alone more often -- and if I'm going to get anywhere near the protein and calories I'm supposed to have -- I must have good tasting food. Yes! I expect food to be decent tasting! Sue me. Call me a baby. I don't think it's a lot to ask. In today's world of year-round food options at the grocery and online-sales of specialty ingredients, I don't see why this should be such a big thing to ask for.

I think that I am not alone in this. I think this issue is greatly behind why so many people cannot maintain lowcarb in the long run.

People go offplan dominantly because they want to experience a certain taste that is not on plan. They just can't stand it, they have got to have the garlic bread and mashed potatoes at the family barbecue, they've got to have the cranberry sauce and apple pie at thanksgiving. Now, they might have resisted just one or two things. They would have suffered without their favorite yams, for example. But suffering without all of it -- left with plain turkey (gravy is usually made with corn starch) and a few green beans and iced tea, when everyone else is eating richly and drinking eggnog and having warm pies with ice cream -- come on.

Let's get real. This takes monumental willpower on most people's parts. And if the person has not been eating enough protein, and worse if they've been eating stuff like lowcarb bars and other stuff that can spark cravings, their own body is going to be working against them.

If you don't want your employees to steal, your child to do drugs, and you know they are massively exposed to opportunity and encouragement, you wouldn't just shrug it off as their problem if they give in to temptation. You remove temptation, or you do something that helps mitigate that circumstance. Usually both.

So in lowcarb, you arrange it so you don't need to go to the lunch truck for your food. Because let's be honest, even if they offer a couple very simple foods you could eat, the smell of the spicy deepfried burritos and onion rings is going to whack your whole body hard. The olfactory sense is supposed to be the most powerful memory and pleasure stimulating sense there is, and anybody on a diet who ever smelled something they couldn't have will easily vouch for that.

And, when you can't help but be in a situation of massive carby food like family holidays, you provide an alternative: Make your own cranberry sauce, turkey gravy, mashed potatoes, apple pie, and eggnog. Can you do all that on lowcarb?! Sure. OK, it's true, your "mashers" might be from a different veggie that tastes amazingly like potatoes when done that way; your apple pie might be zucchini pie which also tastes amazingly great in a similar way to apple pie, and there might be a couple specialty ingredients like thickeners and sweeteners to make some of the stuff lowcarb instead of highcarb. So what!

If you eat it all at once, won't you go over your daily carb limit? Yeah, all at once, almost for sure. But you could have some of all of that, and all together still ingest lest carbs than a 'small', one-dish 'cheat' on normal carby food. That much won't toss your ketosis generally, and if it causes a few days of carb-cravings you have to beat with protein until they recede, it still is unlikely to have nearly the effect that falling completely off the wagon would.


Some people's lives depend on staying on lowcarb eating. Going off the wagon (as they say) is not just an issue of blowing a diet. It's an issue leading to horrifying ailments in diabetics, and horrifying health and lifestyle issues in obese people, and death to both. This is not something that flippancy is appropriate for, or casual reference to 'well they oughtta have willpower' or anything like that. That is not a proactive way of approaching the question of how to save lives and pursue health for people. If we want to save the lives of the people, we need to look at the reality of how people do eat, how they need to eat, how they can eat, and do everything we can to work out a plan for ourselves, or our families in need, that lets them have a good food life, while being healthy as well. No eating plan works if they are not on it!


What works for me is food that I want to eat. Sometimes that is steaks and chicken and salad and broccoli and a few berries in a protein shake, perfect for lowcarb. Sometimes, it's waffles, or something on bread, or chocolate.

There's only one solution. I have to do enough cooking, experimenting, and gathering recipes, to make myself familiar with a wide variety of lowcarb food options. So if I really want chocolate or lemon or I really want spanish rice or pancakes or eggnog, I have an option to deal with that need.

That need is probably more emotional than physical. But as noted above, it's likely there are few people who don't have some degree of psychology involved in their eating, we just only notice it with the overly- fat or thin people. It is still just as real and it still needs to be addressed if the goal is to keep a person eating on-plan.


I'm reading recipes endlessly. I'm collecting favorites like a new fevered-hobby. I'm experimenting daily with what might be edible for me. I'm imagining new variants and possibilities. I got "Rye flavor" bakers use to add to the flaxbread with a little caraway seed for better bread to have open-topped sandwiches with. I'm trying to get this "Oatmeal flavor" to add to flaxmeal cereal with a little brown sugar extract for a hot cereal-like option.

My mouth and my psychology want the taste. My body doesn't need to really have oatmeal or brown sugar. If I have some of the taste, while I am chewing and swallowing, I am happy. If I try to build in some protein to that, and if other meals better make up the protein/nutrients I might not be getting from that, what difference does it make?? Maybe eventually I can develop more love for what is yet-better food, and less love for stuff that is carbish. But right now, I need to be on the eating plan.

Just like Richard Atkins was not real worried about whether induction phase of his diet was short on veggies, because there was a vastly greater danger of the patient keeling over from a heart attack long prior to a lack of green beans doing them harm -- in the same vein, I am just not so worried about whether it is better to only eat proteins or avoid all forms of artificial sweeteners. The bottom line is that if I am staying on plan, then every single day, I am one step closer to saving my own life. Isn't that really the first and most important thing?

Maybe if I could just ditch a lifetime of breadish-obsession and sweet-needs and chocoholism, I'd be healthier, I'd lose weight faster. But if I want to lose weight at all I have to stay on-plan right? And 'm not sure that can happen at the moment unless I have more variety in tasty food.


I see a lot of people online when I read various lowcarb forums. A surprising number of the food lists on journals are so dull my entire appetite falls asleep from boredom.

Since I started lowcarb, suddenly, I love food!

I paid almost zero attention to food before this. I ate whatever I felt like that was fast and close at hand. If it wasn't, I didn't eat. I ate while doing programming work, while standing, while in the car, with no attention to the detail. My husband learned that if he brought me food I ate and if he didn't, I didn't eat. If he brought me two of something, I ate that seemingly happily; if he brought me six, I ate that the same way. If it was there at hand I would eat it. I've never really cared much about the detail, except that it has to taste good to me and I can't be sick of it. I am very focused on whatever I am doing, and food usually has to interrupt that.


My best friend recently pointed out that not only had lowcarb not made me restricted but it had blossomed my entire interest in food. It has! I find it so exciting to go through the options!

Now like humans of old, I am being forced to put a lot of time and attention toward acquiring what will enable me to survive. Far more than normal. At least till I get handle on this. Some may think it's unreasonable or obsessive, the amount of time I've spent on it (I've heard this complaint recently). Let 'em!

My food is gonna taste good, and it's going to have variety. I insist! I can do this.

Off to the kitchen to experiment. I hear flax pancakes calling me. Viva la Low Carb!

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