There’s always the do-over.

Boy, I’ve really been getting on my own nerves lately. I am supposed to be gradually easing back into carb-eating by adding WHOLE foods. What have I been doing instead? Taking up my carb count with junk and with non-junk that I’m not supposed to be eating right now. It’s rather difficult to see whether I’m OK at 35 grams or at 40 grams (the next step up the carb ladder) when I’m eating enough carbs to almost take me out of ketosis.

If you’re wondering whether I’m annoyed at myself, you would be correct.

And it’s not the all-too-common excuse of, “You must need those foods or else you wouldn’t eat them.” Nobody needs a candy bar or a bowl of ice cream. Nobody needs French fries. Y’know, that kind of thing. In my case it’s been too many low-carb tortillas (I have devised an excellent method of eating cheese sandwiches when feeling snacky), brown rice, and the occasional taste of something I’m not supposed to have. And too much coffee. If I’m going to do the coffee perhaps I should grab some Da Vinci sugar-free syrups, as they have no carb count while granular Splenda is one gram per teaspoon. And that’s without counting the heavy cream. Le sigh.

And yes, I’m still having issues with vegetables. That’s got to change.

I think I need to start over with Induction. I don’t think I will need it longer than a week (if I start it tomorrow I’ll be on it a little over a week, actually). But just to get the junk out of my system, make myself eat the veggies and so forth.

The weight loss is going fine and better than fine. That’s not the issue. The issue is I need to be better at this healthy eating thing than I am presently.

I think something else I need to do is make menus for myself. If I know what I’m supposed to eat in a given day then it won’t be so easy to go over my carb count and I won’t have to worry about being under it either.

Wish me luck.

Carb counts and cheat foods

The weight-loss phases of Atkins are an excellent argument in favor of preparing most of one’s food at home. This is the most frugal and nutritious approach anyway if those are goals of yours; you know what’s going into your meals and you have total control. But it’s also a huge help with carb counts. Even when someone else makes my meal for me when I’m at home (my little girl’s dad sometimes cooks for us), I have to guesstimate a lot, but if I do it myself it’s no problem.

It sounds obsessive and control-freaky but one of the goals of Atkins is to know your limitations insofar as how many grams of carbohydrate you can get away with in a day and stay at your current weight or lose weight. And the reason this matters is that the primary metabolism for human beings is the glucose metabolism, and glucose calories are therefore the calories that count for most people. Fat is turned into various biochemicals and used to transport fat-soluble vitamins; protein is used to build cell structures; if you’re getting enough carbs, neither fats nor proteins are used for fuel. This is the gaping, bleeding hole in calorie theory. Calories do count, but only the ones you’re burning!

Meanwhile, I’ve been rotten this week, but only to a point. Wednesday I decided I was tired of salads and had a wrap sandwich at Subway. They don’t use the low-carb tortillas for their wraps anymore but I could have done worse; the wrap was 33g (I don’t know about the fiber content), lower than any of the breads. I checked the next day and I was still in ketosis. I’m not sure if I’d been knocked out of it at any point and then went back in; if not, my carb tolerance is higher than I thought it was! Yesterday at the state fair I ate a few French fries (as in, less than half a dozen) and bought a sugar-free “homebrewed” root beer at one of the booths; the man said he’d gotten complaints about the sugar-free version and his fix was to add less than half a cup of the sugary stuff on top to help the flavor. I agreed to it because he sweetens the diet root beer with aspartame, which I really do not like. I think I had one or two other episodes with stuff I was not supposed to eat–oh yeah. I got some sugar-free Twizzlers Thursday night. That in itself wasn’t much of a problem although it’s kind of stupid to use up your carb allowance with something that can only be described as junk food, but at the time I was missing junk, probably because I was hungry. So I ate more of those at a time than I should have. Again, it wasn’t an excessive cheat; I seem to be good at taking dabs here and bits there every now and again and then stopping. I still have some Twizzlers left, actually, I think, and it was a small package to begin with.

The cheating bugs me a little because even though I am reasonable-ish about it I don’t want to turn this into a nasty little pattern of justifying cheats to myself and then shriving myself afterwards. This may just be my conscience working in overdrive, though. I’m more worried, actually, that I’m not getting my full carb count during the day with stuff I AM supposed to eat than I am about the cheats.

I’ve upped my allowance to 35 grams a day for the next few weeks and will be doing my utmost to make sure I hit the mark more often than not. I really need to see if the weight loss continues at that level. It makes me wonder about how realistic it is to increase carb count 5g a week like the Atkins book says to do. Seems like in no time I would be up to 50g a week and wondering when the heck my weight loss stopped and having to back down again. Better to take it slowly, I would think.

Which also makes me wonder about the folks who choose to stay in Induction for months at a time. Dr. Atkins thought this would not be harmful to most people who try it, but why not simply add on about five grams a month? Then it’s lots easier to see where your carb tolerance is and you can still lose weight like whoa. And you can also still do the Pre-Maintenance phase of adding 10g at a time, at least in theory, later on.

Although I’m starting to wonder about that too. You’re supposed to do OWL until you’re within ten pounds or so of your goal weight. OK, fine. But what if your carb tolerance is low? It would be all too easy to overshoot your limit in Pre-Maintenance, I would think, especially if your ACE (Atkins Carbohydrate Equilibrium) is 40g or so.

Oh well. The beauty of this diet is that you can tailor it to some degree to meet your needs. Some people who go on Atkins never do Induction at all, but start at 100g a day or so and gradually lower the carb intake until they start losing (if they aren’t losing at 100–some people do!). Whatever works for you.

The hard part isn’t lowering the carb intake…

…but increasing it again. You wouldn’t think that would be the case, given all the horror stories about carb cravings and falling off the wagon. Incidentally, every now and again I get a very slight taste of something that’s supposed to be forbidden at this phase of the diet. But that’s it. Literally, just a taste, and then I’m fine again. Otherwise I have to force myself to remember to eat enough carbs to be at a proper level for this particular week. In OWL you have to add 5g a week of net carbs until you get to a point where you’re not losing anymore.

This is hard. Why? Don’t know. Part of it’s wrestling with eating vegetables. It’s one thing to shrug it off when you’re eating Standard American Diet and opt to take supplements instead. You can’t do that crap with Atkins. OK, you can take supplements and usually should, but if you skip the veggies you don’t get most of your carbs.

I finally got smart and opted for frozen veggies because salad wasn’t cutting it, no pun intended; I’d forget the stuff was in the fridge and it would rot, and that’s expensive. Frozen is mightily forgiving, though, in comparison. And yet, I’ve got like six bags of the stuff and I’m still not eating it. What gives?

No point wasting more time being analytical about it. Got to start eating the allotted amount tomorrow. In the meantime, I am not ramping up my carb intake anymore until I can hit 30g a day consistently for a week. Once I’ve got that down, we can struggle with 35g next time around.

One little deviation I don’t worry much about is carrots, by the way. They’re supposed to be high-glycemic but if you look at the carb count on a package of California mix (broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots), the net carb count is really low. I’ve also read that although they’re high on the glycemic index, you have to eat huge amounts of them to get that level of glycemic response. I haven’t been sent yammering after chocolate-chip cookies after partaking of them, so I won’t worry about it. They’re a great source of beta-carotene and fiber, they’re not acidic, and they’re not boring.

Something else to not sweat it about is yogurt. Dana Carpender quotes the authors of the GO-Diet as saying that since most of the lactose in yogurt has been converted to lactic acid, you only have to count 4g net carbs in a cup of yogurt. I’ve done that, and it works fine. I sweeten it with a teaspoon or two of Splenda (1-2g net), and I tried adding a packet of coffee-flavored sugarless Emergen-C to it the other day and it tasted pretty good. It also works with berries, obviously, which add another 3-5g per half-cup depending on which you’re working with. I wouldn’t mix berries with coffee flavor, though. And this is still just an occasional treat, not an everyday thing.

Silken tofu might be a better bet, for smoothies made with low-glycemic fruit.

But first let’s get the veggies back up. That’s vital. At least I am still taking my vitamins just about every day.