If You Have To Eat Carbs In The Coronavirus Emergency

I remember reading about how in the Holocaust era many Jewish people were trapped behind the walls of ghettos and not given enough food to avoid starvation. The little food they could get might not be kosher. So rabbis ruled that the kosher dietary rules could be suspended for the duration of the emergency.

Our Keto * Low-Carb dietary rules are not about spiritual concerns but about health concerns. So if an emergency comes up, it’s not so easy to suspend the dietary rules that preserve our health. But there are ways to do things that will influence our state of ketosis only minimally. 

The principles I use come from the book ‘The Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet’ (1991) by Drs. Rachael & Richard Heller. This diet plan (which does not substitute for a low-carb eating plan) calls for eating 2 low-fat, low-carb meals a day, and allows you one ‘Reward Meal’ at which you can eat carbs, so long as your meal does not last longer than an hour. 

Now, if you are addicted to carbohydrates, I don’t think taking a ‘hit’ of carbs every single day is dealing with your addiction. It’s like telling a heroin junkie he can have as much heroin as he likes for one hour a day, or a drunkard that he can go on a daily one-hour drinking binge. Not the right way to handle it.

Both Dr. Atkins and Dana Carpender mentioned the Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet, but both say that even if your body can handle these ‘Reward Meals’ some days, you shouldn’t try it every day. What I have done is that when I am going to eat some carbs I shouldn’t anyway, I keep the carb-eatings to an hour or less. If I haven’t eaten carbs for a while, it may not even throw me out of ketosis, though my blood sugars won’t be as low as they are when I don’t eat carbs.

In a situation like the local food shortages caused by the Wuhan coronavirus, you may find yourself at the mercy of a family member who ‘scored’ a big bag of rice— and not even brown rice which is a bit better. The thing to remember is that you can not eat rice (or other carbs) at every meal. You can eat a serving of carbs at one meal in the day, so if there is a rice dish on the table you can have some. 

For your other food during the day, you should have meat, eggs, fish, poultry— whatever you can get. It’s spring, there should be eggs somewhere. Spring is when laying hens lay the most eggs.

If you can’t get enough proper low-carb foods to keep you unhungry, make yourself bulletproof coffee or tea a couple of times a day. You can use coconut oil, butter, home-made ghee, EVOO or the fat you drained off from cooking bacon. (I’ve had bacon fat in bulletproof hot cocoa and loved it.)

You probably cannot eat your rice meal every single day and still maintain your health. If your family members complain about you being so picky, remember that the worst cases of Wuhan coronavirus seem to be happening to people with diabetes/prediabetes and obesity. You can’t afford to carb-binge every day and become more vulnerable to a severe case!

An every-other-day plan, when you are eating carbs in an emergency, is probably the best approach. If you stay in a state of ketosis, you won’t be that hungry and can do without big meals when the food is not there. You may need to be on a dull meal regime of canned chicken, canned tuna, & canned salmon plus your daily salads. (If you have a hard time getting salad veg, NOW is a good time to order salad sprouting seeds— Broccoli & Friends mix, or alfalfa sprouting seed— and perhaps a Victoria sprouter though you can use a plain clean jar to sprout seeds. Get in the salad sprouting habit and you can eat salad every day even when store supplies are not reliable.)

If you are offered two or more carb sources on your Reward Meal day, pick things like rice— ideally brown rice— rather than a slice of chocolate cake. It’s easier to stop eating rice. 

Another emergency situation that many low-carb people face every day is that posed by institutional meals— school food, soup-kitchen and homeless shelter meals, non-perishables from a food bank, Meals on Wheels, and other high carb sources people are confronted with. Learn to just eat the part of meals that is allowed low-carb, and do without the rest. If your institutional food source is a little flexible, ask for things like hard-boiled eggs. 

When I was in a homeless shelter last year, I used my small money supply to buy Atkins drinks and bars, since many meals there were fairly free of anything low-carb to eat. (There was also a tater tot casserole once with ice-cold tater tots in it— obviously undercooked— too dangerous to eat even for a ‘Reward Meal,’ and tasted more like a punishment meal anyway.) It’s a tough life if you have to eat institutional food, but staying in ketosis as much as you can will at least keep you from getting hungry. 

Having the right mindset helps. Eating carbs should not be a treat or ‘Reward Meal’ for us, but a miserable emergency measure we use to stay fed and alive in dire situations. You can eat things like rice in those situations without ruining your health, if you do so carefully and not-every-day.

Holy Saturday (& belated Passover) Greetings from

Nissa Annakindt

I do welcome comments, but have to insist that commenters use their Google accounts and comments be moderated because of a flood of spam comments I had. Sorry about that. 

Carbohydrate Binging on #MeatlessMonday

Evidently the vegetarian community has been trying to sell 'Meatless Mondays' for quite a number of years now. The idea, I guess, is if they guilt people over their meat eating enough to eat vegetarian meals just once a week, they will get 'hooked' on the less-than-ideal vegetarian diet restrictions.

The problem with actual Meatless Monday menus is that the place of zero-carb meats is being filled by high-carb items such as whole grains and legumes (beans, peas, lentils.) Do any of us actually need MORE carb binging in our lives?

And the alarming thing about Meatless Monday is that it isn't being kept a private matter. School lunches are also a target--- not just in some oddball private academy which only allows vegetarian families to send their kids there, but regular schools that normal citizens have to send their children to. Should schools really be promoting a high-carb, less healthy, more restrictive way of eating to young kids who don't know about nutrition yet?

There are no scientific studies that I know of that associate a meatless diet with weight loss and the kind of health benefits we get from a low-carb diet. During my vegetarian days, I believed them when they said 'there is no such thing as a fat vegetarian.' But that was a lie. Anyone on a carb-based vegetarian diet is at great risk of the health problems associated with carb-eating, including obesity.

But you can do both vegetarian and low-carb, can't you? Well, technically yes, but the combination is more expensive and much more restrictive. On the modern version of the Atkins diet, vegetarians are advised to allow themselves more carbohydrates while on the Induction level. What does this mean? Some people have to stay near the Induction level to lose any weight at all--- so this means that starting a couple of levels above Induction is going to mean some vegetarians won't get into ketosis and get the benefits of that state, and some with bad metabolisms may never lose weight on it.

Instead of #MeatlessMonday, I much prefer #FastingMonday. Because I know meat is not bad or a sin, but instead it is the kind of food God or Nature provides for meat-eating critters like lions, bears, and humans. Let the sheep and goats of the world eat meat-free. Let rabbits. Just don't impose meatlessness on fellow humans who need meat in their diet to remain healthy.  It is a cruelty.

The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet: Just a You-Can-Still-Eat-Carbs Lie

Carbohydrate addiction. I can relate to that. Carbohydrates play the role of an addictive substance in my life. Which is why I bought the book  pictured at right: The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet. I thought it would help me deal with my addiction.

What would you think of a program for people addicted to heroin, alcohol, gambling, marijuana, casual sex or cigarettes that told the addict: You can still have your heroin, alcohol, casual sex or cigarettes once a day. And you can have as much of your addictive substance or practice as you can consume during one hour.

Would that actually be helping with the addiction, or just enabling the addict to live in denial about the addiction? Well, that is the plan of the Carbohydrate Addict's Diet. You eat two low-carb meals a day, and for the third, you get a Reward Meal, in which you can have all the carbs you can eat. Later iterations of the diet insist that you eat your regular low-carb foods--- your protein and salad--- and if you want more carbs than you planned on for your Reward Meal, you have to eat extra protein and salad as well.

In Dana Carpender's book How I Gave up my Low-Fat Diet and Lost 40 Pounds, Dana gives her own review of the diet. She likes the idea that if you eat excess carbs, it's physiologically better to finish the carb binge in an hour. But when she tried the actual diet herself, she plateaued at a weight higher than she liked, and she didn't feel very good with the daily excess carb dose, since she had been on low-carb previously.

My own experience is somewhat similar. Except that I am a real sucker for carbs, and once I felt permitted to eat any carbs I craved once a day, I didn't feel very inspired to concoct two low-carb meals, with salads, every day. (Call me a barbarian, but I don't regard salad as a meal, or even much of a meal component. I'd rather have bacon.)

Going on the Carbohydrate Addict's diet just led me off low-carb and back into eating large amounts of carbs, like barbeque flavor potato chips, Butterfinger candy bars, pizza and cheeseburgers.  It worked about as well on me as a 'rehab' plan allowing alcoholics a 1 hour alcohol binge every day would help alcoholics.

One proof that the Carbohydrate Addict's diet didn't work for people in the long term is that there doesn't seem to be any community of Carbohydrate Addict's Diet devotees online anywhere. Another is that the original diet was modified in subsequent books to try to limit the carb consumption at the Reward Meal.

I believe that the Carbohydrate Addict's diet is not a help for real-world carbohydrate addicts, but a cruel lie. People who are tempted by this diet would be better off trying a standard ketogenic diet and actually dealing with their carb addiction instead of feeding it on a daily basis. Find new ketogenic-friendly foods you love, and those old carb foods will have less power to tempt you.

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Have you tried The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet? Did it fail you, too? Or perhaps you are still on the diet and want to defend it. Your input is welcome in a comment!

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Here are the books I mentioned in this blog post. I recommend the Dana Carpender book, but The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet, since I don't recommend it as a diet, isn't on my must-read list.