JANN’S RULES FOR LOW CARB EATING


RULE #1

If it's protein -- meat, poultry, eggs, fish/seafood, cheese, tofu -- eat the @#$$ out of it. Eat as much as you want. (But do pay attention, and stop when you are full.) When I ate bacon, which was AT LEAST once a day, I sometimes ate 1/4 pound. Once in a while 1/2 pound. Now I eat a pound of bacon in 5 or 6 breakfasts, not 4, often with eggs, or smeared with mayonnaise. I ate fried chicken and fried catfish without any trouble from the batter. I also ate salami and hot dogs (see note on packaged food below)


RULE #2

If it's "salad food," eat as much as you want. Lettuce, tomatoes, onions, radishes, etc. Put it all in one bowl and eat it as salad. Just eat cucumbers or cauliflower. (smeared with blue cheese dressing?) Cook it, like broccoli or cauliflower, or eat it raw. Eat as much as you want. But forget fruit. If you HAVE TO, eat grapefruit or tart apples, no more than 1/4 a day.


RULE #3

If it's pure fat – like butter, mayo, olive oil, etc. -- don't worry about it. Eat as much as you want. As far as salad dressings, make your own, or see note below. Lighthouse Blue Cheese is excellent, I eat it 1/3 or 1/4 of the (small) jar at a sitting. Sometimes with salad, sometimes with a fork. It’s great on raw vegetables, my favorite is cauliflower. Read ’Lights Out : Sleep, Sugar, and Survival” by Bent Formby. That guy says if it leaves a smear when you step on it, go for it! (This is a terrific book, by the way.)


RULE #4 (The above rules apply to fresh foods. Here's the rule for packaged)

If it has 0-1-2 carbs per serving, eat as much as you want.

If it has 3-4 carbs per serving, I think about whether I really want it. Can I eat just one serving? Same with peas and carrots. It's not good to eat tons of them. If you can keep yourself to one small serving, go ahead. If not, forget them for now.

If it has more than 4 carbs per serving, it's got to be really special. (If it's got more than 6, just think, you're paying MONEY to make yourself sick...) There are alot of good salad dressings in the 0-1-2 range... load up on them. If you LOVE 1,000 Island and can't find a really low one (there are some 2s, I think Paul Newman’s Own is pretty low), measure and keep to 1-2 tablespoons. But as my sister has always said, “Jann, you're just into gloppy.” She’s right: I'd rather have my Lighthouse Blue Cheese by the cupful than something else by the spoon.


RULE #5

Forgive yourself when you take a "break." I had 85 pounds to lose. In the first four months, I wrote in a break every 3 weeks or so. Either because there was some event I didn't want to miss, or because I just needed chocolate ice cream. Within 24-48 hours you will feel so awful, you'll go back. It's the only self-propelling diet I've ever seen.


FIND OUT WHAT YOU CAN TOLERATE AND WHAT YOU CAN'T--

Some foods will trigger a binge. I can guarantee you won't be able to eat one cookie. I could eat cornmeal fried fish and Popeye's Chicken without going on to Hershey bars. Not so with boudin. (Louisiana sausage with some rice in it.)


Figure out when you’re going "off" and at the very first, try some food you think might or might not trigger your buttons. If you can eat it and stop without going on to Little Debbies, forget the binge until the next weekend, and add that food to your once-in-a-while list. The next Friday or whatever, test some other food. If it triggers two days of Little Debbies and Doritos, you were going to binge anyway!


NEVER TEST A NEW FOOD BEFORE YOU HAVE TO WEAR YOUR BLACK DRESS PANTS TO AN AWARD CEREMONY. (I learned this the hard way-- maybe you won’t have to!!!)


But the good news is, if you stick on the diet, you won't be "tempted" by no-no foods: they stop looking good. Or smelling them is enough. Something I can't explain.. The supreme test for me was a reception for the opening of the new building of the LA Medical Society. A whole roomful of little tiny garnished desserts, and they looked exactly like the magnificent bouquets to me: beautiful to admire, smelled heavenly but you wouldn't think to eat them. However, I kept moving until I got to the roomful of CHEESES!!!!!! And another room of grilled meats and vegetables!


If you make a mistake and eat something that triggers you big-time and you can’t seem to stop, ride with it, eat everything you've been missing for 24-48 hours and then go back.(After a day of Little Debbies and Dorito’s, you’ll wake up with such a hangover, you’ll be READY to go back.)



RULE #6

Read Atkins and Eades books from cover to cover, or start with Dana Carpender’s HOLD THE TOAST. Know what and why you are doing this. And if you have serious medical situations, don’t do this without a doctor. AND DON’T ACCEPT A DOCTOR WHO DOESN’T SUPPORT YOU IN THIS.


One other note: if you are female and over 35, keep track of your estrogen levels. Estrogen is stored in body fat, and if you've lost any amounts of body fat, your hormone levels might drop enough to give you some symptoms, ESPECIALLY if you have stopped drinking beer. If weird things are happening with your brain, especially with moods, memory, and balance including light-headedness, or new problems with sleep patterns, scalp or skin itching/rash, joint pain, or intolerance to noise, the culprit might be estrogen rather than thyroid.


If you are wondering about the estrogen, ask me questions: I know alot about this, and can recommend some good books to read, some "natural" and vitamin strategies to try first, and some suggestions to get your doctor to take you more seriously about it if you feel you need prescription supplementation. (I have taken estrogen since I was 20, am now 51. This is still not menopause, just hereditary deficiency made worse by losing body fat and lowering cholesterol, from which hormones are made.)


As to thyroid... take your temperature for a month or two BEFORE YOU MOVE FROM THE BED first thing in the morning. If there's a pattern of it being significantly below 98.6, it might be thyroid, and if you have that documentation (or two months documentation that your body temp is normal so it's NOT thyroid), your doctor might be more willing to believe you about either one.


GOOD LUCK!!!!


And please feel free to ask me specific questions.


A FEW MORE THINGS:

Your body stores water in carbohydrates. If you don't eat very many carbs, you hold no water, which is why you might need potassium and salt supplements on this diet, and why you can drink a ton of water without floating. One way you can tell this is true: when I have stuck to the low-carb thing, I don't wake up with marks all over my body where my jammies bunched up under me while I was sleeping!


HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE: They just did some expensive study and found out that water pills are just as effective as any other blood pressure medication. DUH???? Read the above paragraph again. If you don’t eat carbs, you most likely won’t have high blood pressure. But if you do have high blood pressure, dropping the carb count to around 20-30 will have the same effect as a water pill for most people.


When you eat a higher amount of carbs, you immediately start to hold water again. One or two days of eating ice cream, and I can go up 8-15 pounds. Two days back on protein/fat and it's gone. Get used to this... it's not a big deal. Keep a pair of pants or a loosely-cut skirt you can wear, and don't worry about it. Just be sure you do what it takes to get rid of it right away. The longer it’s there, the harder to drop it.


If you intend to reintroduce carbs into your diet, I think you need to expect your constant weight to be at least 5-10 pounds above your Atkins weight. I have stayed on low-normal carbs for several months, though, and never gained past the first, nearly overnight, gain. That is, I gained a chunk IMMEDIATELY, but even while eating 100+ carbs a day, never gained any more than that. What I eat now is much different from what I ate before I started this diet. Even when I am "off" the diet, there are certain carb foods I just don't like anymore, and I am used to eating alot more unprocessed fat and protein than I did before, when I ate less protein and more processed fat (Little Debbie’s).


ALCOHOL

HERE'S MY EXPERIENCE:

Dry red wine is fine, dry white a little trickier. Dry champagne seems to be fine, specially since you never drink too much of that, right? Hard liquor seems to be ok, with water, seltzer, or diet soda. Sweeter wines are out, I guess; I don't like them, so I've never tried.


As to American beer, Miller Lite, the low-carb recommended is 3.5 per bottle. Bud Dry is 6.7 per bottle. I prefer the higher alcohol and taste of Bud Dry, and would rather drink half as many of them as drink Lite beers. The new Michelob Ultra is 2.6 – that’s pretty much what I drink now if I drink beer. (Except for occasional binges of Dos Equis with lime.) Anything else is 20-40 per bottle, most likely. Beer and wine are actually quite unhealthy, according to some researchers, and we should all give it up. Oh, well. Then again, you got the studies says the French and Italians are healthier because of it.


I also like Malibu Rum in diet Fresca, and Peppar Absolute in V-8 (which is higher than any other choice because of the V-8. But think of all the vitamins.) I now steep my own vodka in Poblano peppers for that, and have been experimenting with steeping Vodka in berries, and then freezing it with Diet Sprite to make “Sorbet.” If you put in more Vodka, you get slushies, or more DSprite you get popsicles. If I were REALLY trying to knock off a lot of weight, I would stick with dry red wine, sparingly. For maintenance, any of the above seem ok.


ALSO NEW: “Premium Malt Beverages” now come in low-carb. I have tried Anheuser’s new Bacardi Silver in Black Cherry. It’s not too sweet. (splenda) It actually tastes more like fizzy water, but after 2-3 you might fall over the cat when you try to walk.


MY WARNING ONE MORE TIME -- Women over age 35 who suddenly lose a lot of weight, and/or have stopped drinking massive amounts of beer need to keep close tabs on estrogen. Both situations above can lead to a drop, and serious problems, most noticeably mood and sleep patterns, also itchy scalp/skin, being off-balance including lightheadedness, joint pain, greatly decreased tolerance to noise.


HEAVY CREAM

"Heavy" cream is milk from which ALL the whey has been removed. (step that comes right before you beat it into butter.) You can't buy it unless you know a dairy and they make it for you intentionally. Real cream should be so thick you can turn the jar upside and it won't budge... it is the coagulable part or curd, almost entirely fat, and has almost no carbs at all, because the lactose (milk sugar) is in the whey. The closest you will get in a grocery store is "Whipping Cream" which is proportionately lower in fat, and higher in carbs than real "cream," but in the last 50 years that's what recipes are thinking when they say "heavy" cream. We used to get real cream when I was a kid from a friend of my grandmother’s neighbor who ran a dairy, and you really could turn the jar upside down without it moving.


HINTS FOR TAKING FOOD TO EAT AWAY FROM HOME—


Pepperoni.

Comes in a vac pac, doesn't need refrigeration until you open it, and unless it's well over 100 degrees, for several hours afterwards. (I should know, in South Louisiana!) Just munch it by itself, or mix with string cheese, another thing you can carry when you don't know if there's a refrigerator. (I was a temp for a while on this diet, and never knew on the first day what kind of kitchen there would be.)


Bacon.

Also goes without refrigeration for quite some time after you’ve cooked it.


Eggs.


"Picnic"

My friend Anita kidded me about this all the time while I was working on a project in the same space she was using. "Bring your little picnic over here and talk to me while you eat," she'd say. This requires refrigeration, but it is wonderful: Cotto Salami and Swiss Cheese. Mayo or Blue Cheese Dressing. Pickled Salad Peppers, either pepperoncini or the round red ones. Here's the best order to assemble: lay the swiss cheese down on the plate/napkin. Then the salami. Put the mayo down a line across the middle, and stick the peppers in the line of the mayo. Roll the sides in over the middle, like you'd fold a piece of letterhead to go into a #10 envelope. It's messy, ‘specially with the peppers' juice, but you can't beat it.


TIPS ABOUT EATING OUT --

I ate a little cup of Wendy's Chili, beans and all, almost every day while I was on the first press, losing 50#s in three months. Wendy's is also pretty good about building their larger (goopier) burgers for you in a little salad container, rather than on a bun. When you ask someone to leave something off, you might say you are "allergic" to it, which implies lawsuit, therefore careful attention, but more important allows for more sympathy than dieters usually receive. However, this is getting better. I lost the 85# in 1996. NO ONE knew what low-carb was then. Of course, many of the restaurants still don’t understand it, but use it as a catch phrase.


Here's my baked potato trick -


Order with all the toppings on the side. When you get it, scoop out almost all of the white stuff, and then eat the butter, sour cream, cheese, bacon, onions, etc. on the skin. The proportion of carb to fat becomes so low that it doesn't really bother me. Once in a while the whole potato is ok, unless it's one of those monster ones. Specially with a steak.


HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE THE STIX TO TURN PURPLE AGAIN AFTER YOU'VE BEEN OFF THE DIET?


IN A GENERAL SENSE--

If you have been following the diet strictly for several weeks, and cheat, once, eating the entire feast within one hour, you could be out of ketosis for six to eight hours, or less, and then bounce right back.


If you have been OFF the diet for several days or longer-- after you stop eating carbs nearly completely -- it will take you two days or longer to rid your body of the carbohydrates it is holding.


Most situations are going to fall somewhere in-between.


HOW TO COOK FOR CHILDREN, ESPECIALLY BIRTHDAY CAKES—

1) Think of it as "food for children." Do you want to grow to more than twice your current size? That's what children are supposed to do. Do you want to be told what to do all the time, and not be able the take yourself anywhere? That's what children do. (you can figure out where else to go with this.....)


2) Think of it as tasting like cold, congealed beet gravy. A friend of mine lost a lot of weight imaging that.


3) Would you steal food from starving children overseas?


THIS IS MY FAVORITE HEAD GAME --

4) Imagine that you've been kidnapped by terrible people, and forced to eat until you are blimp-esque. You've now been rescued, and you are so grateful to get away from those monsters, you'll never be able to eat nasty sugary starchy things again without remembering how they treated you.


SOME THOUGHTS-- I got in a lot of trouble posting this on a list-serve once. The moderator had a FIT. But I stand by it.


You say "I wish my weight wasn't so tied in to my self-esteem." I'd like to challenge that thinking... the self-esteem isn't tied to your weight, but to whether or not you are producing insulin. If you stay on the diet, and eat in a manner which produces glucagon instead of insulin, you may think your self-esteem is up because you're thinner, but it's the chemical balance in your body/brain which is making your self-esteem soar. Conversely, you don't feel worthless because you failed everyone by eating that pizza, and now you gained a pound; you can’t help feeling like -- because your body chemicals are out of whack! (At the beginning it only took me four days of eating this way to realize that I felt SO MUCH BETTER, I was committed to it EVEN IF I GAINED WEIGHT.)


Stop kicking yourself in the butt about your WEIGHT and get going eating some more protein and fat! It's not psychological depression... it's really physical depression of chemicals you need.


THE PROCESS OF DIGESTING CARBOHYDRATES MAKES CHEMICALS IN YOUR BODY THAT MAKE YOU FEEL DEPRESSED AND TAKE AWAY YOUR SELF-ESTEEM.


You can't MENTALLY change brain chemicals – even with superhuman will power. Brain chemical upsets are not moral or spiritual weakness. You can only change them by changing the physical chemistry in your body and brain. You can do this, of course, by taking anti-depression drugs like Prozac, OR YOU CAN DO IT BY REDUCING THE AMOUNT OF INSULIN YOUR BODY IS REQUIRED TO MAKE!!!!!!


ONE MORE THING--

I'd also like you to consider that the phrase "continue losing weight" does NOT mean the same thing as "NEVER cheat, and lose 15 pounds EACH AND EVERY week." LIGHTEN UP, GIRL. You’ll make some mistakes. Oh, well. Go back to it.


And remember that "buffet" usually means alot of great ATKINS food, and alot of nasty white pasty doughy sticky tasteless carb-food. WHICH WOULD YOU RATHER EAT? Prime Rib with Horseradish Mousse or SMASHED POTOTOES FOR PETE'S SAKE!@!@!@!@!@! This should be a no-brainer.


MAINTENANCE CAN BE ONE OF TWO THINGS, AS I SEE IT.


1) carefully eating 5 more carbs per day for a week, 10 more the next week, etc. until you reach a balance level.


2) eating more carbs on days when there's something going on, and eating Atkins Induction-style for a while when you start to feel crappy again. This has the feel of "adventuring, followed by scurrying back to safety," but you have to pay less attention to what you're doing than in

strategy #1)


BLOOD LEVELS

As an adult, my triglycerides were almost always over 500 – UNTIL ATKINS. After six months on Atkins, they were 60. Same with cholesterol. Dropped to a bit below normal. And I eat fats without monitoring them in any way... bacon, blue cheese dressing, other cheese, tons of eggs, salami, etc. Read the book. It's not fat that causes these problems, it's the production and presence of insulin in your body... ie hormones required to process carbs.


For a long time, I was stuck where 1X was too big, but regular clothes were still too tight. Somehow I found a ton of great stuff in the closets of my friends. Try asking folks your height if they have clothes they can't/don't wear anymore. (It helps if you admire how they dress, too, but sometimes you can't be so choosy. :)


ABOUT CHOLESTEROL.

I know a bunch of folks who started this after New Year’s, felt great, lost quickly, and then had their cholesterol done. It was high. Well, no $&!%, I told them... what did you eat during Christmas? Had you checked the cholesterol BEFORE you went on the diet? It might be 300 now, but it was likely 400 when you started the diet. However, they are now convinced Atkins is terrible, they'll die if they don't eat a lot of carbs, and guess what, they weigh more now than they did after Christmas.


Don't look too critically at the first reading after you start, especially if you didn't have a reading done right before you started for comparison. It might have been alot higher before, and is actually dropping. If you are concerned, but feel wonderful on the Atkins plan, have it checked again in six months. You also need to look at the ratio between good and bad. Is that better? If your cholesterol goes up, but the ratio is much better, that's what matters most. On a low fat diet, many people's "total cholesterol" drops, but the ratios get MUCH MORE UNHEALTHY.


Mayo Clinic Guidelines:

Total cholesterol is at a "desirable" level under 240

The "good" or HDL cholesterol is at a "desirable" level above 45

The triglycerides are at a "desirable" level below 200 (I’ve heard: your age +100)

The LDL cholesterol is "desirable" udner 160

The total cholesterol divided by HDL is "desirable" below 4.5

The LDL divided by HDL is "desirable" below 3



Do you feel better? Did little naggy problems like headaches, heartburn, afternoon sleepiness, etc. GO AWAY????? It did for me. And they only return when I go off the deep end on ice cream or pasta salad for a day or two. Also, my eyesight got better, and sometimes if I eat something really sweet, I can immediately feel my eyes having difficulty focusing. This should tell us that we’re dealing with some really toxic stuff.


AND THE FINAL KICK IN THE PANTS:

Don’t think carbs are addictive? Answer this: you ever driven to the store in the middle of the night in a storm wearing a raincoat over your pajamas? (I’m headed somewhere with this, just answer truthfully.)


WAS IT EVER FOR TUNA SALAD ??? A BOILED EGG ??? HOW ABOUT A PORK CHOP ????