Lowcarbezine! 17 November 1999
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Welcome to this HUGE, jam-packed Thanksgiving Issue of Lowcarbezine!
I'm thankful for all the folks who sent me kind comments about our
premiere issue last week, and for all the people who have subscribed in
the days since then!
All contents Copyright 1999, by Hold the Toast Press. As always,
however, we invite you to forward Lowcarbezine! to family and friends
who you feel might enjoy it, so long as you forward it in its entirety.
If Lowcarbezine! has been forwarded to you, and you enjoy it, you can
subscribe for free at our web site: http://www.holdthetoast.com .
Thought For The Week
Ready or not, friends, here come the Holidays!! A time of joy, a time
of stress, a time of EATING. If you're going to make it to the New
Millennium with your low carb resolve and your waistline intact, you
need to start thinking about strategy NOW!!
Am I going to tell you to sit through Thanksgiving Dinner without eating
a single carb? Am I going to tell you to forego stuffing, potatoes,
gravy, and pie? Hey, I may be on a Mission From God ( :-) ), but I'm
not crazy! If you've read my book, _How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet and
Lost Forty Pounds!_, you know that I believe in "Indulgence Days", when
you eat whatever you wish, without guilt. However, there are some
strategies to this which will help keep it from being a permanent
diet-breaker. Here's some tactics to help keep you from ending up in
big, big trouble:
1) Get *very* clear with yourself: Giving yourself an Indulgence Day
for Thanksgiving Day does NOT mean you have an Indulgence for the entire
4 day Thanksgiving Weekend!! At Thanksgiving Dinner you may eat what
you like -- I mean that sincerely and wholeheartedly. But send the
leftover pie (or stuffing, or mashed potatoes -- whatever your nemesis
is) home with someone else. If you're having Thanksgiving Dinner at
someone else's house -- a *terrific* strategy, by the way! -- turn down
all offers to send leftover carbs home with you. Ask if you can have
some leftover turkey instead!
(My "strategy" here -- actually, not anything I engineered -- is to go
out for Thanksgiving Dinner this year. We're going to my
father-in-law's, and he takes us out to dinner, at a place where they
roast a whole turkey for each party! So there will be plenty of yummy,
low carb turkey, plus leftover turkey to take home -- but only one
serving each of stuffing, potatoes, and dessert, and no leftover carbs
at all! Anyway, when it comes to Thanksgiving dinner, if it's not
homemade, I just don't care that much. Very little temptation to go
overboard -- last year (this is our second year in a row of visiting my
father-in-law for T-Day), I didn't even eat the dessert, since it was
pumpkin mousse, which doesn't ring my chimes. I'm an apple pie girl,
myself.)
2) Start off Thanksgiving Day right, with a good, high protein, low
carb breakfast. No starving yourself all day till Thanksgiving Dinner,
so you'll have more room for carbs! Eating your regular low carb
breakfast will also help you if you're the one cooking the dinner --
you'll be less likely to nibble on everything you're cooking. You'll
also have a nice, stable blood sugar and energy level, which means
you'll be dealing with the stress of having a houseful of guests far
better. You may be surprised at how enjoyable a holiday can be!
3) Give some thought to which of your traditional Thanksgiving carb
foods really matter to you, and eat accordingly. It's silly to eat
something that you're not really crazy about just because it's part of
the traditional meal. For instance, I adore stuffing, so I'll have a
full-sized portion! But I could care less about candied sweet potatoes,
so, while I might have had a small portion in the past, I won't bother
having any now that I'm low carb. Really think about which carbs will
give you the most enjoyment!
4) If you're taking the whole weekend off, and will be hanging around a
houseful of people all chowing down on leftover pie and hot turkey
sandwiches, and eating chips in front of the TV, do yourself a *huge*
favor and lay in some wonderful low carb snacks. Be sure you have sugar
free chocolate mousse in the fridge (if you don't have my recipe for
chocolate mousse, go to the web site and take care of that little matter
right now!), or strawberries and whipped cream, or something else to
help you stay away from leftover pie! And get some festive low carb
snacks, too -- miniature smoky links are good, so are hot wings. Low
carb veggies -- celery, cucumber, peppers, cherry tomatoes (higher than
the other three, but *so* nutritious!) all are good -- with a great dip
is a good idea too. Smokehouse or salted almonds, or toasted pecans are
fine, as well. If you've got a health food store nearby, try tamari
roasted pumpkin seeds -- we love these! Cheaper than nuts, and more
nutritious, too. And, of course, there's always pork rinds, although
they're not my favorite. If you love them, however, go for it! The
point is, have something you really like to nosh on already in the house
before the feasting begins!
5) If all the leftovers are starting to talk to you, *get out of the
house*. Go to the movies, the mall, for a walk. Get a jump on your
Christmas shopping. Rake some leaves and join the kids in jumping in
them! Visit the library and get some books about Thanksgiving or
Christmas to read the kids -- or just a great, trashy novel for
yourself! Go downtown to see the Christmas decorations that will have
appeared overnight. Do something fun, instead of sitting around staring
at food.
6) Count your blessings -- always a good thing to do, and especially
appropriate for Thanksgiving. Be grateful that you have a roof over
your head; millions don't. Be grateful that you have to worry about
your weight -- millions are starving. Be grateful that -- at least for
those of us in the United States -- we have not known war on our soil
for almost a century and a half. Be grateful for the Internet, an
unparalleled force for world unity, unequaled source of a cheap
education (okay, after the Public Library), and more fun than just about
anything else I know. Be grateful for friends and family -- if you are
genuinely known and loved by even one person whom you know and love in
return, you are rich. If you are known and loved by more people than
that, you are rich beyond telling. A grateful attitude is a good start
to not feeling sorry for yourself!
These and many more blessings on you and yours, and have a *wonderful*
Thanksgiving!
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Frequently Asked Question
I've heard I'll gain all my weight back when I go off my low carb diet.
Is this true?
Yep. Of course it's true! If carbs are your problem, they're your
problem for life, and you'll have to control your carb intake forever to
maintain your weight loss and keep any health benefits you've gotten
from the diet. You'll be able to eat a *few* more carbs on maintenance,
but you're never going to be able to have toast and juice with
breakfast, fries with lunch, pasta for dinner, and cake every time
someone at the office has a birthday, and keep the weight off.
Is this a big surprise to anyone? It shouldn't be, because it's true of
*any* weight loss diet! Think about it -- in the past, when you've gone
on low calorie diets to lose weight, haven't you gained it back as soon
as you went back to eating without counting calories? The regain rate
for *all* weight loss diets, low calorie, low fat, low carb, or anything
else you can name, is over 95%, for the simple reason that people go
*on* a diet with the idea that they'll lose their weight and then go
*off* the diet. But when you go back to eating the way you used to eat,
you *will* go back to weighing what you used to weigh -- or, if you've
cut your calories to the point where you've lost muscle mass (low carb
tends to spare muscle), you may gain even *more*.
The thing I love about low carb, and the thing that makes me certain
that I'm *not* going to gain my weight back (it's been over four years,
and I'm actually still shrinking very, very slowly) is that I'm so
comfortable eating this way. I never have to be hungry. Every time
I've lost weight before I've done it by feeling hungry all the time, and
it was *not* fun. Eventually I'd get sick and tired of feeling hungry,
start eating enough to be comfortable, and the weight would come back
on. But on my low carb diet, I have a "normal" appetite, which is to
say that my body seems to want just the right amount of food to maintain
itself at this healthy weight, and I don't even have to think about it
-- so long as I stay off the concentrated carbs! And the food that I
*can* eat is *great*, so I don't feel sorry for myself one bit!
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Confused by all the low carb diets out there? Wondering which one to
try? Sick and tired of boring, confusing medical jargon? Read the book
that gives you all the options, and is easy and fun to read! _How I
Gave Up My Low Fat Diet and Lost Forty Pounds!_ , by Dana Carpender.
http://www.holdthetoast.com . Now available through Amazon.com too!
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Product Review
SPLENDA!!! Boy, if you haven't heard about Splenda yet, be ready to
have your socks knocked off! This is the new artificial sweetener
approved by the FDA earlier this year, and it's terrific. Here's the
lowdown:
The chemical name of the sweetener in Splenda is sucralose, and what it
is is a sugar molecule with an extra chlorine atom patched in. As a
result, your body doesn't know what it is, and doesn't absorb it.
Oddly, the extra chlorine makes sucralose *far* sweeter than sugar.
Therefore, to make the table sweetener called Splenda, they bulk it with
malto-dextrin. This makes Splenda measure the same as sugar, which
makes adapting recipes a whole lot easier. It also adds a few carbs,
but not that many -- Splenda has 0.5 g of carb per teaspoon, as compared
with 4 g per teaspoon of sugar, so Splenda has an eighth of the carbs of
sugar.
How's it taste? Wonderful. Better than any artificial sweetener I've
tried before, and better than stevia, too, although I still like stevia
for some things. Also, unlike aspartame (Nutrasweet, Equal), Splenda
doesn't lose its sweetness when heated, so you can use it in cooking. I
used it to make some green tomato chutney this fall, and it worked just
great! As soon as Thanksgiving is over, I'm going to start working on
sugar free cheesecake recipes for you.
Any drawbacks to Splenda? Only a few. First of all, like other
artificial sweeteners, while it will add sweetness to foods, it does not
have the same textural effects as sugar. It doesn't add the same
volume, either -- while it measures the same as sugar, that's because
it's very "fluffy". As soon as you wet it, it fizzles down to almost no
volume at all. So it's going to be easier to adapt some recipes than
others.
Also, it's not in grocery stores in most areas yet, although there are
some sucralose sweetened products out there -- some kinds of diet soda
now have it, for instance, so if you're one of the people who has been
avoiding diet pop because you react badly to aspartame, start reading
labels! And because Splenda isn't widely available yet, it's still
fairly expensive. I ordered it from
http://www.synergydiet.com/lowcarb.asp . They also have a number of
other low carb and/or sugar free products available -- many are pricey,
but it's nice to know they're available!
(One quick note about low carb specialty products: Just because they
say "low carb" or "sugar free" does NOT mean you don't need to read the
label! I was at a store in Greenwood, Indiana recently that specializes
in low carb products. Many of them, although *very* expensive ($5 for a
tiny bottle of sugar free ketchup!) were, indeed, low carb. However,
when I read the labels on their low carb bagels and breads, I learned
that they weren't as low carb as people thought. The shop owner -- no
doubt due to an honest mistake -- had been telling her customers that
the bagels had 4 grams of carb each. When I read the label, I
discovered that they had 4 grams of carb *per serving* -- and that a
"serving" was less than half a bagel! They were actually more like
10-11 grams per bagel -- still quite low carb for a bagel, but not
something you could eat with reckless abandon and expect to keep
losing. I saw folks really loading up on these, too -- I'm afraid
there's going to be a lot of people hitting "plateaus" and wondering
why!
Further, the single biggest ingredient in the bagels and the "low carb"
bread was still white flour, also spelled g-a-r-b-a-g-e. If you find
stuff like this near you, consider it an occasional acceptable treat,
but not a staple!
So read the labels on *everything*, and remember: If it seems too good
to be true, it probably is!)
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That's it! What a huge issue! Have a great Thanksgiving, and we'll do
it again next week!
Dana W. Carpender
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