Put On Your Low-Carb Colored Glasses

A lot of people fail on Low-Carb, Keto or Atkins because they lack information. Dr. Jason Fung started asking his patients to fast because when he put them on a low-carb diet, they were coming back and reporting that they had given up bread and started eating pita bread. He would have his patients fast for three days right away— without doing Keto * Low-Carb and getting in ketosis which would make the fast painless.

We need to get to the point that we pick up a package of processed food, gaze at the ingredients list, and right away spot the ingredients that make the food not-for-us. We need to be able to look at a recipe and spot which ingredients are full of carbs. We need to put on our low-carb colored glasses.

The way I learned to do that is that I had an old copy of Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution (1972.) I got it in a thrift shop in Iron Mountain, Michigan, at a time when low-carb and Atkins were considered just an old fad diet. There is a chapter in that book called: The Revolutionary Never-Hungry No-Limit Steak-and-Salad-plus Diet. (There is no chapter number in that edition, but there is an index in the front so you can find the chapter in question.)

This book chapter is essentially a diet sheet, probably based on one Dr. Atkins handed out in his practice. It tells you which foods you can eat in unlimited quantity, which ones you can have in restricted quantity, and which ones were out-of-bounds. I read that chapter multiple times until I had the content almost memorized, still read that chapter from time to time, and therefore I pretty much know what foods I can and can’t have. You need to learn that, too.

I prefer this old Atkins books to newer books because it is very practical for patients that didn’t keep food diaries, consult carbohydrate gram counters, or use modern apps to calculate macronutrient percentages. It doesn’t have you counting your carb grams, which means you are not tempted to give up your salads and your cheese and heavy cream rations to use those carb grams on a tiny portion of a high-carb food you are addicted to.

UNLIMITED FOODS

These are mostly zero-carb foods, and as such are mostly meats, poultry, fish and seafood. Eggs, which do have less than 1 gram of carbs, are also included as an unlimited food. Butter and fats, salt, pepper and spices, and water and carb-free drinks are also unlimited.

LIMITED FOODS

You are allowed the juice of ONE lemon or lime, four ounces a day of any hard, aged cheese, 4 teaspoons of heavy whipping cream.

FORBIDDEN FOODS

These are the foods that made you sick, or fat, or carb-addicted in the first place. Bread, biscuits, candy, cookies, bananas, baked beans, milk, macaroni and potatoes, among other things. You need to learn what these are— by reading the list in the Atkins book, and by reading labels in the grocery store. If that new ‘high-protein’ cereal has more grams of sugar than Froot Loops, we need to give it a pass. 

OTHER RESTRICTIONS

Many people on Keto * Low-Carb have given themselves many other restrictions— they don’t eat soy products, or green beans or alfalfa sprouts because they are ‘legumes’ just like baked beans, or they abhor ‘canola’ rapeseed oil. Sometimes the additional restrictions are based on good science. Other times they are arbitrary— such as not using butter or heavy cream because Paleolithic man didn’t keep dairy animals. Don’t jump in to following a rule just because you heard it on a podcast or read it in a keto online forum. Ask for the peer-reviewed scientific study that backs the new restriction up.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT:

Get out your copy of Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution (1972,) if you don’t have one, buy one. Find the chapter I mentioned above and bookmark it. Every morning for two weeks, start your day by reading this chapter through. You might each day pick out one kind of allowed food to buy and eat— things you already like and something new. And pick out each day one food from the ‘forbidden’ list, look up the carb count to see why it is so bad, and perhaps find substitutes for the ones you love the most.

Have you had any difficulties learning the rules for Keto * Low-Carb? Have you made mistakes and learned better? What makes you stick to it even when it’s hard? Drop me a comment!

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