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. 

Must Moms force Kids & Husband to finish Junk-Carb Dinner?

Television food-related commercials exist to make the bad eating habits that enrich the food processors socially acceptable. In addition to that vile ‘potato-pay’ commercial which has popped up again, there is that frozen-pizza commercial in which a mom is proud that she has compelled her husband and children to finish their frozen-pizza junk-carbs dinner.

OK, the whole idea behind finishing one’s dinner was that traditionally dinners were composed of decent food. Or, at least, as decent as the family could afford. Poor people have historically used bread and potatoes to fill the gap where the meat they couldn’t afford would be. 

But when dinner is junk-carbs, what is the point of finishing dinner? Maybe the snack food you might eat instead might be less deadly. 

Since the death of the home-cooked meal and its replacement by processed food and fast food, all heavy in carbs, finishing dinner is more of a health hazard than a benefit. It doesn’t even solve the hunger problem if there are enough carbs involved— you will just be hungry before the next meal rolls around. 

And the family dynamic thing is skewed all to heck in that commercial. Moms are traditionally wives who are traditionally women, who don’t suffer from the toxic masculinity their male husbands allegedly have. But that doesn’t mean women are so wonderful that a man will put up with being treated like a child who needs to be compelled to finish a junk-carbs dinner. Adult persons normally expect to be able to eat what they like— even to going on a healthy low-carb regimen if they want to.

As for frozen pizza for children, they are not only being robbed of a healthy meal with real meats and real veggies, but they are missing out on a learning experience. Children aren’t born knowing how to eat a steak or a pork chop or a salad. If they are fed on an all-junk-carbs and processed-foods diet, how will they cope when they become overweight and are advised to change their diet for the better? Better to let them have real food that will build their health and not destroy it.

Finally, trying to force any human being to eat a food they don’t want to finish is a losing game. It just makes the person more bullheaded and more willing to sit at the table forever to avoid the broccoli.  And if you finally train the person into being a member of the ‘Clean Plate Club’, how will you feel when the person becomes a dying 500 pounder with a compulsion to finish all food regardless of hunger level?

Do you ever feel guilty about refusing a carb-filled food that you are served at a meal? Do you feel a compulsion to ‘clean your plate?’ Do you feel that throwing a bit of uneaten mac & cheese in the garbage will somehow make third world children starve? What other attitudes about food are standing in the way of your health?

Yes, I ate carbs.....

Over the past little while, I have slid into a habit of consuming carbs again. This is what happens: I eat a carb meal or snack, perhaps because I've been at a relative's home and there was nothing non-carby to eat. Or I just had a craving for a carby snack.

The problem is, I then get hungry for more carb foods. I'm not good when I feel hungry. I feel hungry in the mornings again so I'm not doing intermittent fasting and the no-breakfast plan. Then my blood sugar rises, I get depressed and feel lousy, and it gets worse from there.

And so I must STOP. I start making cups of tea in the morning because that makes it easier to fast. I make simple ketogenic/low-carb foods so that when I do eat, it's less likely to be carbs. I usually feel like heck when I'm going back onto my routine, but I know when I get through it I will feel energetic and be healthier.

I've listened to a Jimmy Moore fasting podcast to start the day--- even though he's discontinued that particular podcast it is still inspiring and I think I plan to listen to them all. You can find Jimmy's Fasting Talk podcasts at: http://www.fastingtalk.com/

The Christmas season, which evidently starts before Halloween now, is often a time when we have to eat other people's carby cooking or get cast out of the family. Some people think we should give in, just once. But for me, one carby meal leads to days or weeks of carb hunger. Maybe it's better for some of us NOT to eat carbs just-this-once.

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One of the things I'm doing to get on track is making some bone broth. I had the major bones involved roasted and in freezer bags. I also had a few bags of leftover bones from pork chops or chicken. I filled up my BIG slow cooker (8 quarts) with bones and have got it going. I really want to get on a daily bone-broth routine which means making broth more often. Which means finding sources of bones. Not so easy around here.