They are Out to Sabotage Your Keto * Low-Carb!

Everyone on the Keto * Low-Carb way of life will experience sabotage— from friends and family members, from medical people, from food corporations….

It works something like this— you go to aunt Mabel’s house and she knows you are on lowcarb. So she serves you brown rice instead of the white rice she usually makes, and a big banana instead of ice cream for dessert. Because brown rice is good for you, and banana is a fruit and the carbs in fruits don’t count. And because your Aunt Mabel thinks she knows more about healthy foods than you do.

Dr. Atkins in his first book explained how the diet saboteurs work. In his day, most people didn’t know about lowcarb diets and thought all diets were low-calorie diets. So if a food was perceived as low in calories, any dieter could have it regardless of the carb count.

Today more people have heard of lowcarb, but they may have weird, wrong ideas of what it is. Maybe they think you can’t have regular bread but can have unlimited pita bread. Or that you can’t have regular noodles but can have whole wheat noodles. And they may think that the carbs in fruit or in vegetables or in whole grain products do not count.

We know better. We know that all carbs count. But you can’t tell other people that, in many cases. If you are or have been fat and they are not fat or less fat, nothing you say counts as much as what thin people say. 

Emotional issues may be used to make you eat more carbs than you should. A relative fixes a special cake or special cookies just for you, and you will be a bad person if you don’t eat them.

But if you had a deadly allergy to peanut butter, would you eat a food with peanut butter to please someone else? You know you wouldn’t. Well, you likely have a deadly ‘allergy’ to carbohydrates which can cause your early death if you don’t take care of it. 

Sometimes people urge us to go out to restaurants which don’t have a single menu item we can have. Just to be sociable. And you go and order something you shouldn’t have, resolving to eat just half— and often you eat more than half.

Fast-food restaurants train their employees to tempt you to buy more carbs than you want. You go in to order a small burger— you don’t intend to eat the bun— and a side salad, no dressing. And they push you to order French fries and a soda to go with that— carb-filled foods, and foods you may have had an addiction to. You may need to avoid eating out when the local restaurants all push carbs and your lowcarb meal at their hands is likely to be dismal. (When you are eating your burgers without the buns, you may find that your favorite burger joint becomes your least favorite, because their actual burgers are dry and nasty, but they cover it up with buns and condiments.)

Married couples can have problems— when she needs to be on keto for health reasons and he wants to continue with the high carb foods he always eats. There is no easy answer. You cannot demand that someone else change what they eat to accommodate you, or not keep the foods they like in the house because they tempt you. But on the other hand you need to take care of your own health, and certain temptations may be too much to bear in your own home.

A compromise might be to ask the carb-eater to refrain from keeping the most tempting carb foods around, and concentrate on the ones that you wouldn’t touch. I don’t care for those ‘kettle’ potato chips or that circus peanut candy. Bring peanut butter cups in the house, though, and you will have to keep me off them with a machete.

I would not recommend you break off important relationships over the carb issue. But your health is important, too. Don’t be ashamed if carbs tempt you. They tempt a lot of people. But if you were a recovering alcoholic, people would be more respectful and not invite you to barrooms or insist on keeping alcohol in a shared household. If you were a recovering drug addict, they would understand not to bring their own heroin stash to your house to tempt you. Others need to treat your recovery from carbohydrate addiction as a serious thing. And if they don’t, ignore them.