Pain, Pain, Go Away!

It may not be fashionable in the low-carb world, but I like to snack. I feel better when I snack. I don't feel good when I eat big meals and don't know how people put away three-egg bacon-cheese omelets with a bullet-proof coffee. The good thing about low-carb snacking is that by definition, you avoid eating junk like potato chips and fruit pies. The bad news is that low-carb snacks from the convenience store are expensive. Time was when the only two kinds of coffee I drank were free and home-brewed. When I realized cream gave me problems, I started taking it black and then realized that the office coffee was terrible. But the little shop on the first floor made a wonderful cup for $2.11. An equally wonderful home-brewed cup is about 12 cents. Sleeping in an extra ten minutes, the time it takes to brew a 12-cent cup of coffee, is costing me almost $500 a year. I've set my alarm earlier. The convenience store sells Kind bars for around $2.50 and large diet Dr. Pepper fo

Have you seen the trailer for That Sugar Film ? It's funny and smart, and I'm glad the film is being made, but it talks up reducing or eliminating added sugars. If you're going to try this at home, how do you know how much added sugar a product contains--unless it doesn't contain any? For example, the almond butter I buy lists as ingredients dry roasted almonds, honey powder (sugar, honey), palm oil, sea salt. My 80% dark chocolate is made of organic chocolate liquor, organic raw cane sugar, organic cocoa butter, organic ground vanilla beans. They both list total carbohydrate and fiber content, but how in the world are you supposed to distinguish how many carbs came from the sugar and how many came from the other ingredients? Without knowing the amounts of all the ingredients, you can't. By the way, at nine grams net carb per half a chocolate bar and five grams net carb per two tablespoons of almond butter, these products with sugar added come in at a fraction of

CNBC laments the decline of cereal for breakfast. (Click here for video.) Cereal killers at the breakfast table Thu 22 Aug 13 | 11:56 AM ET The following transcript has not been checked for accuracy. cuckoo for cocoa puffs anymore. how are cereal companies handling a decline? the good news, fewer people are skipping breakfast. the bad news, more of skipping cereal. where is mikey when you need it. he will try it. he eats everything. he likes it sm. in the game of life cereal, tastes change. consumers are swimming to yogurt or foods you can eat on the go. so-called cold cereal unit sales have cold 10% in the last three years. they'reinnovating, coming up with protein shakes, breakfast bars, however cereal remains the number one choice for breakfast in america. but not all consumer choose a bowl of cereal and milk. it's also impacting milk sales. also declining as people switch to other beverages. dean food says it's going to be a tough quarter. there

"If you won't tell us, the bet is off, that is all. But I'm always ready to back my opinion on a matter of fowls, and I have a fiver on it that the bird I ate is country bred." [Sherlock Holmes] "Well then, you've lost your fiver, for it's town bred," snapped the salesman. Sherlock Holmes gathering clues in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" In ten years, will urban poultry growing be so common that we'll be arguing whether country birds or city birds are better? Will medical appointments be so difficult and antibiotics so ineffective that we'll argue whether a sick friend should take vitamin D, coconut oil or phage for her bad cold? Will be be eating more pigweed and lamb's quarters? Giving funny looks to low-fat fossils? Doctors aren't mean, most of the just haven't caught on. May the population get so well that they'll have time to raise some birds!

Did I just wake up in another city? Three years ago, people here in Denver looked at me like I had two heads when I told them I limited carbohydrates. When I was a kid, my parents' fussy neighbors complained about the roosters crowing, even though they moved into a house adjacent to an agricultural lot. But maybe in a city that loves meat and attracts health and fitness buffs, it had to happen: more people want real food and real solutions to their health problems. I just spent the morning at a chicken exchange, where people also had goats, ducks, rabbits and turkeys for sale. The exchange was in an urban neighborhood of Denver between Broadway and the tracks, five minutes from downtown.  Chicken Swap . Image from http://www.denverchickencooptour.com/ From there, I went to Vitamin Cottage, a health food grocery store, where some of the vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free books and magazines have been replaced by paleo, anti-sugar and pro-cholesterol books. T

Is this a marketing strategy for that underserved low self-esteem market? At least they're honest.

Re: the movie Cereal Killers , a documentary about a man who starts researching heart disease and puts his own hypothesis to the test, has reached a milestone. This just in: We are delighted to report that Cereal Killers has reached the 100% funding milestone on kickstarter folks! To each and every one of the 183 persons who have carried us over the line and into new terrain - THANK YOU! SO...What happens next? Well for us, we just take a deep breath and we keep going.... The momentum, awareness and goodwill generated by a successful kickstarter campaign is only bettered by a super successful kickstarter campaign. Sometimes projects REALLY catch fire and that's where we're aiming next. Kickstarter promotes projects that look like they're gonna take off, and they do that based on the number of pledges and the hype a project is creating on the internet. Now that we have reached our target, every £1 pledge or tweet or facebook share adds weight to our visibil

Tom Naughton's post on breakfast cereal inspired me to post photos of a box in the window of my neighbors' house down the street. Click photos to enlarge. Almost makes crap-in-a-bag sound good.

Dedicated low-carbers like to describe their way of eating as nutritious, filling, healthy and traditional. But what about people who want to eat decadently, not Puritanically? Who are sick of busybody goody-goodies and diet police ? Low carb is good for them, too. On what other diet can you eat dip for dinner and dessert for breakfast? Guacamole, pork rinds, crispy fried pork (fried in lard, seasoned with salt). This isn't a cheat meal--you can have this every night and eat until you're full since there are hardly any carbs there. (Note that you can't substitute corn chips--they're too carby. And don't get guacamole that's full of carbs.) If the dinner looks a little skimpy, it's because I saved room for dessert. Low carb, non dairy chocolate ice cream. It does have carbs in it, so go easy. Recipe here . I'm not sure if this is what some people call "rewarding food," but I'm full. Granted, I was never obese, but I'm from a

It's day 2 of being back on a very low-carb diet. I'm off the sweet potatoes (you know, those wonderful safe starches) and I've cut back the dark chocolate. I thought it would take a couple of weeks to keto-adapt and get back to feeling good, but I'm already feeling like my old self: no more upset stomach, no dragging myself out of bed late this morning, no nap on the bus tonight, and no mid-afternoon grogginess. And no more humiliating thought that Alice Cooper , who started his band before I was born, could probably run circles around me. Blogger Kia Robertson could use some shame. She's the activist who made a useful idiot of her nine-year-old daughter at a McDonald's shareholders meeting. Mrs. Robertson, through her spokeschild, whined about McDonald's food and marketing. I doubt the Robertsons are shareholders in McDonald's. Call me a traditionalist, but a shareholders meeting is for shareholders, particularly grown-up ones who understand the b

A potato is a lump of sugar. -Guest on Jimmy Moore's podcast Three years ago when I got into low carb diets and helping my mother control her diabetes, I gave myself a blood glucose test. Since I was wheat-free, I used a suggestion from the Blood Sugar 101 site : I ate a potato. That you can use a potato for a home glucose test should be the first clue that it isn't very good for you. Further clues take a little more digging (sorry). It's a given in camp paleo that grains and beans are Neolithic foods--foods that we weren't eating much of, if any, before we started farming. They're full of lectins and antinutrients. But so are some other agricultural products: potatoes have been cultivated for around 7,000 years in Peru,(1) and spread to the rest of the world only in the past 500 years.(2) Even if you're Irish, German or Russian, your ancestors haven't been eating potatoes for more than a few hundred years. Traditionally, potatoes went through a proces

I've never understood the appeal of pancakes: they're dry and tasteless. If you put syrup on them, they're sweet and soggy. Being mostly flour and sugar (if you put syrup on them), they really should be considered a dessert. Crepes are a different animal: they're light and fluffy and moist if you put some butter on them. They're not too eggy-tasting. If you make them with coconut flour and don't drench them in syrup, they shouldn't jack up your blood sugar. In other words, they're real food, not dessert. The recipe is from Cooking with Coconut Flour by Bruce Fife. It took 15 minutes to make these.

Four More Weeks My orthodontist wants to wait four more weeks to take my braces off so that I can get a new crown. Meantime, my insurance is actually considering paying for some of this expensive dental work. Hot dog. Acid reflux, acne, and upset stomach down to flavored coffee I just tried to expand my food horizons and once again, ended up with problems. It took a few months to figure out it was flavored coffee. It's not the caffeine or the acid, since regular coffee and tea doesn't bother me, or anything I put in it (I take it black). It's not any natural flavors, since nuts, vanilla and cocoa don't bother me. It's the chemicals. According to enotes.com , Flavoring oils are combinations of natural and synthetic flavor chemicals which are compounded by professional flavor chemists. Natural oils used in flavored coffees are extracted from a variety of sources, such as vanilla beans, cocoa beans, and various nuts and berries. Cinnamon, clove, and chicory

Have you heard the latest scare tactic against wheat-free eating? A wheat free diet will give you vitamin B deficiencies. Since wheat flour is fortified with B vitamins, substituting wheat-free food will make you sick because wheat-free flour isn't fortified, and bread and cereals are such a major source of B vitamins, says Holly Strawbridge, Executive Editor of Harvard Health Letter . Dietitian Kristi King over at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics agrees . Are they right? Let's look at the evidence. How much vitamin B is in, say, a slice of wheat bread? The yellow row in the table has the answer; the top row is the recommended daily intake of the vitamins. (Click the lower right corner to enlarge) B vitamin table from Lori Miller There's NO vitamin B6 or B12 in the bread, and compared to the recommended daily intake levels, there's only a little bit of the other vitamins.  Fortified cereals have more vitamins, but (as with bread) the B vitamins are ad

Maybe it's just the places where I eat, but restaurants seem to be putting less and less salt on their food. If you're not home, it's a bit of a problem if you find yourself low on salt : lethargic, nauseated, having a headache--kind of like having a cold, but without the congestion. What to do? Grab a bunch of salt packets at fast food restaurants.  Get a personal salt lick . Weighing in at five to seven pounds, it can double as a free weight and a weapon that would sail through TSA inspections. Sears, of all places, sells salt pinch tins . My choice is a pump salt mill produced by Vic Firth. It's the size of a small flashlight and heavy for its size. It'll fit in a small purse and it doesn't look like it would leak or get caught on anything.

When someone considers going on a low carb diet, they tend to ask, "If I'm not eating bread, potatoes and cereal, what's left to eat?" It's shocking that starch and sugar makes up so much of a typical diet that people ask this. Naughty foods are bread and potatoes and Kool-Aid. These are nice foods: Left to right: bacon, baking cocoa, butter, oxtail, broth (note they've kindly provided a low-fat and low-sodium warning), chocolate (note the very high cacao, and therefore low-sugar, content), red wine (go easy on this), and diet soda (full disclosure: I'm a shareholder in the company that makes Hansen's). Don't even think about trimming the fat--fat, not carbs, is your fuel on a low carb diet. Some staples at my house: Left to right: sardines, hamburger, beef liver, pork rinds, frozen vegetables, free-range eggs, Splenda, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Who says Atkins is an all-meat diet? I've read that low-carbers eat

Jeff Sun, a dancer with Shen Yun Performing Arts, was so moved by the meat culture in Argentina that he wrote a poem about it using chengyu (Chinese idioms), with an English translation provided. To wit: "芳香四溢 (fāng xiāng sì yì) I drown in your fragrant balm." What salad could have inspired this? Or fueled performances like these ?

What if one or two little tweaks could transform your life? Instead of spending years in therapy, hours a week on the treadmill, gagging down whole grains every day, or tearing your hair out over a positive test for an illness, it's possible that making a few little changes could change everything. I've added a list of posts that could do this for a lot of people (see the list below my profile). Don't worry, there's nothing to buy. You might need to check out a library book and do some N=1 experiments on yourself. Overall, these should save you time and decrease your aggravation. Cardio: A Waste of Valuable Dance Time. Actually, there's a school of thought that cardio is a waste of any kind of time (unless you enjoy it). Sure, you burn calories, but you move less later and get hungrier. Studies have shown that it's not effective for losing weight. I don't do cardio (I lift weights instead) and don't need to lose weight. That wasn't the case when

It's funny how a holiday season of giving thanks, religious rites and the start of a new year has turned into a festival of avarice, gluttony and drunkenness. An antidote: Stoicism. Hear me out. Briefly, Stoicism is a middle way about material things, between being ascetic and finicky. Alcohol, fine foods, trendy gadgets and fancy furnishings can be enjoyed, but they aren't held dear. If you're hung over, if your pants don't fit, if you can't pay off the credit card bill, you've gone overboard, even if everyone else is doing it. Stoics don't care much about what everyone else is doing. It's out of their control, so they don't worry about it. They don't worry over the past, either. If you overindulged over the holidays, they'd tell you to forget about it and get back on track. If there are things you simply can't eat, drink or buy, stop thinking about them. And internalize your goals. Instead of saying that you'd like to lose 20

Ten years ago today (yes, the day before Thanksgiving), I started Body-for-Life. BFL involves eating several small meals per day that balance protein and carbohydrate and minimizes dietary fat. Daily workouts involve intense weightlifting or cardio. One day a week is a free day, where you don't exercise and eat whatever you want. Initially, I lost weight, gained muscle and felt great. Eventually, though, I gained back the weight and developed cavities and upper GI problems. The cardio workouts left me exhausted. Free day foods found their way into the other days. I developed GERD, an esophageal ulcer, chronic sinus congestion and a constantly upset stomach. I've written about the logical fallacies of BFL here , here and here . If only I'd read the book with a more critical eye back then, I 'd have saved myself most, if not all, of the misery. The endpapers of the Body-for-Life book are before and after photos taken 12 weeks apart. Let me share some photos here. F