What Diet am I Actually On?

What diet am I actually following? What am I eating? Whose words guide my daily bread?

I think I'll call it "Nan's Miracle Diet". It is an amalgram of many different things. I spent years lying on the couch reading diet and exercise books while eating bonbons, learning different theories on how one should eat.  I had the Big Loss, ten years ago, and some minor forays into different food disciplines since then, to inform my current eating.

I eat low carb. I am also completely tracking every bite into one of several diet tracker / calorie counter programs on the iphone or web. (More on these tools in another post.)  My current eating, leading to some initial modest weight loss, is similar to previous diets in what I eat. My meal pattern is similar to previous recent attempts. The calorie counting and meticulous tracking, however, is mostly new to this attempt.

During the Big Loss, I followed the Carbohydrate Addicts Diet. Basically, as best I can remember, I ate nothing or eggs for breakfast, meat and veggies from home for lunch, sometimes a salad from work instead. Dinner included carbs, including a small sweet.

Now I am trying to have breakfast, of cheese or cottage cheese, every single morning. One ounce of cheese, or four of cottage cheese.  Full fat versions, gloriously rich, but relatively small.  Lunch again is meat and a vegetable from home, or a brought salad, or brought meat with a salad from the bar in the cafeteria. The food I bring is mostly leftovers from dinners, but I do a bit of purpose cooking in order to have lunches that are easy and something I look forward to.  My dinner is always meat-centric in accord with the family's wishes.  Sadly, very red-meat centric, often steak or lamb chops.  I try to introduce more chicken and turkey - for example, half beef half turkey ground meat for spaghetti.  I'm also trying to expand the vegetable intake for me and offered to the family. Always there is a carb - rice, commonly, or potatoes, or bread, or some combination.

Why do I eat low-carb?  Because it works.  In this case, "works" means it allows me to continue eating fewer calories.  If I ate a half-bagel for breakfast, by 10 am I would be back for the second half, then a whole other bagel, and planning a submarine sandwich for lunch, and brownies.  What I believe, from personal observation and from the major low-carb books (Carbohydrate Addicts, Protein Power, Atkins) is that eating carbs stimulates cravings for more.  Why spend my life fighting a craving that can be avoided by choosing differently?  Some of the low-carb diet books try to say your physiology changes and you lose weight faster for the same number of calories.  I don't think I believe that. But I do know that if I start each day low-carb, my calorie total for the day is likely to be lower. Presumably, my blood sugar is more stable, though I can't know that. Certainly, my perceived mood is more stable. The cravings are less, especially the longer I go on with no big carb loads. Danger times remain the late afternoon and late evenings, but seem to be more head than blood or stomach based cravings.

I think most current responsible diet books emphasize more protein, less carbs, and reasonable amounts of fat, like Beck's book I started with this month. Many of them avoid the low-carb label because of some stigma associated with it, started by Atkins I think.  I'm guessing Dr. Atkins enjoyed, and he certain encouraged, the controversy (there's no such thing as bad publicity).  Sadly, I think it may have hurt people's overall eating habits, scaring them away from low carb diets. It created a divide in my mind between "conventional" diets and what really works for me. This divide has kept me away from diet groups, many diet books, and being able to talk to many people about eating.

[WARNING: DIGRESSION HERe]  I remember during the Big Loss, the ADA (American Dietetic Association?) published a critique of low carb diets, including Atkins, that was picked up by conventional media, including NPR and the New York Times as a definitive study about how healthy these diets were.  I took advantage of fairly new search capabilities on the young web to track down the actual "study". It turned out, they set up the criteria that said, USDA food pyramid is healthy, let's compare these diets to the pyramid. Guess what, they don't match, so they must be unhealthy. It further went on to say people only lost water (at the time I'd lost over 30 pounds, hardly water alone), or if they lost actual weights, it was because they ate fewer calories because the diets appeared to suppress appetites.  They failed to discuss why a diet that made it easier to eat fewer calories was a bad idea.  I wrote out an indignant rebuttal, which I posted on my refrigerator.  Rarely have I encountered such bad science or science reporting.

So I eat low-carb. It works for me. I can go some days with primarily meat, and they will be low calorie days. I struggle continually to bring more vegetables into my diet, but in such a way they don't bring hidden carbs with them.

But I finish each day with one, two, or three chocolate squares. I like to have my little treat, less than 100 calories a pop. Because I've had a lot of protein through the day, it doesn't make me go wild. The late night urges are still there, but they are driven by good taste and emotional issues.

More on all this later.