Pain, Pain, Go Away!

This week has found me at a beautiful assisted living home, at the emergency room, and then at a shady-looking storage unit on the outskirts of Longmont to meet a stranger. First, though, the week started with my doing some housecleaning at my parents' place. I cleaned out magazines, catalogs, junk mail, and other old papers--some 15 trash bags full. I found a vacuum cleaner, a printer, a tub of cassettes, family photos, old hunting and fishing licenses, a letter of condolence from my grandparents on the death of my brother Marvin, a letter from someone telling my parents to "kiss the baby" (me), and a bunch of unpaid bills. My parents' assistant and I organized and boxed up a lot of the stuff to get it ready for an estate sale. The room we worked in is beginning to look like a room. Yes--this was all in one room. It's the worst room, but there are several more to go. Monday, a woman who runs several assisted living homes came by, interviewed Dad, and took me

Wouldn't it be great to think, picture and believe your way to a wonderful life? Being a science geek, it's easy to forget how popular that belief is, even among educated people. Call it The Secret, the law of attraction, positive thinking, or affirmations. I call it wishing for a no-effort solution; Richard Rumelt describes it aptly in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: But I do know that believing that rays come out of your head and change the physical world, and that by thinking only of success you can become a success, are forms of psychosis and cannot be recommended as approaches to management or strategy....Nevertheless, the doctrine that one can impose one's visions and desires on the world by the force of thought alone retains a powerful appeal to many people.  This hit home lately because my mother is in the hospital and I have to take time off from work to be with my father since my nephew works afternoons and nights. My parents have an assistant and she's do

Summertime keeps finding me in trouble: a bike wreck, carrageenan poisoning, a badly stubbed toe, and mineral deficiency. Now it seems to be my mom's turn. Saturday, I took her to the emergency room because she was having so much pain in her lower back. Since she's disabled, they called a paramedic to help her on to the stretcher, and she remarked how much she liked big, strong men like him. Hey, she's eighty-four, not ninety-four. Since she'd just had several x-rays of her back a few days before that showed nothing was broken, the doctor gave her some pain medication and sent her home. The pain medication made her woozy. This morning, she lost her balance and fell into her wheelchair while getting out of bed. Dad wouldn't call 911 (he has dementia, and even in better days, he wasn't one to overwhelm you with help). Luckily, mom called 911 herself. Having called for help some 30 times in the past three months, my parents are personae non gratae with the f

It's been three and a half weeks since I first started Atkins induction. I had to stop for several days because of magnesium and potassium deficiencies (I unfortunately started the day before oral surgery, where I had a shot of epinephrine, which can also cause low potassium, and couldn't eat very much in the days following). I lost a few pounds right away, then another few when I restarted. Then I gained it all back due to, ahem, female hormones. That's never happened to me before. I didn't change the way I was eating: no chocolate indulgences or anything saltier than what I'd been eating, and a keto-stick showed large ketones. But I'm back to losing about 0.6 pounds a day. I started at 130; this morning I was 127 and had moderate to large ketones. My energy level is beyond what it was before I started. Sunday, for the first time in far too long, I took my dog for a long hike in the mountains, where she loves to swim in the creek. (She's doing her own

Do Calories Matter on Atkins? As the saying goes, just because you're not counting calories doesn't mean that calories don't count. Dr. Atkins wrote in Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution that you'll lose weight faster on fewer calories, but you won't necessarily have a sense of well-being. Most readers knows what he means: low mood and flagging energy. Lack of Energy, Low Mood This was how I felt Sunday afternoon and Monday. Part of my low mood was from having to fill out an application for Medicaid for both my parents, mostly so that my father can go live in a nursing home. It's too hard for my mother to take care of him and I can't be with them enough to help day-to-day. I was thinking about my parents during yoga that evening and fighting tears. I didn't have a physical sense of well-being, either. The climb from the train station up to the street took more energy than it should have; so did the yoga class. I went back to the book for advice and r

There are some wacky people commenting on LC sites. Over at Perlmutter's blog (Dr. Perlmutter wrote Grain Brain ), someone going by a name that sounded like a plant-based doctor was trolling, poaching and writing in ghetto English. Doctor, my eye. On another site, someone else pointed out that there was, indeed, a reference to calories that wasn't in the index of a certain biochemistry book. Thank god we were alerted. And a groupie warned me not to look to Jimmy Moore for information (after I'd mentioned that he started losing weight again by limiting protein). This was right before Rick G. had a terrific success using that strategy. To all you wacky ones, I dedicate my $25 gift of a share of a water buffalo through Heifer International. (I'm donating $1 to the organization for every troll comment I read.) These animals not only make life easier for subsistence farmers in Asia, but they're promoting peace between warring tribes : In 2008, the International Ass

Last time, I addressed some misconceptions and pitfalls of Atkins induction. It's a simple diet, but it doesn't work with some current fads. First, a word of caution: if you take amphetamines, diuretics (including high blood pressure medicine) or diabetes medicine, you need medical supervision on Atkins induction. Low-carb diets increase your adrenaline (not good if you're already cranked up on amphetamines), flush out excess fluid (bad in combination with diuretics), and normalize your blood sugar (you can get a hypo with LC plus medication). If your doctor objects to your doing Atkins, just ask him or her to monitor you. You might say that low-fat, low-calorie diets haven't worked for you and exercise hasn't worked for you either, but you've given low-carb diets a lot of thought and want to do a two-week trial. If you use insulin, I'm sad to say you'll probably be on your own. I can't tell you how much to use, nor can anyone else on the inter

In the article, some prominent researchers point to the many flaws in the lipid/diet-heart/cholesterol hypothesis and blame refined carbohydrate for soaring rates of overweight and diabetes. Others urge caution in eating saturated fat. Ornish says eating meat will damage the planet. There have been many recent clinical studies exonerating LC diets, but the science has been there since Atkins wrote about his diet in 1972. The end is in sight for the disastrous experiment the government performed on America, and later the rest of the English-speaking world. *To highjack the lead is to take over the leading in partner dancing.

Over the years, I've read some strange ideas about what the Atkins diet is: All meat A crash diet Not low-carb, high fat High protein An eating plan where you gorge yourself Wrong on all counts. A friend of mine was curious a few weeks ago about what it really was. I described it to her, and she can't stop raving about it now: Friend: What do you eat? Me: Meat, eggs, cheese, non-starchy vegetables, and fats like olive oil, mayonnaise, lard and butter. Friend: How much do you eat? Me: You eat until you're full. Friend: When do you eat? Me: Whenever you're hungry. You should also take some vitamins. There are more details, of course, but that's it in a nutshell. How does such a simple diet get so convoluted in people's minds? I blame fads in eating and thought. A trend now is to eat vegetables by the pound --no exaggeration. Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution specifically says not to fill yourself with vegetables--that's a tactic of tradi

Some readers have remarked that they're having a hard time leaving comments. I've changed one of the settings from "embedded" to "full page," having read that that should help. 

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and

Note to new readers: please note I'm not a health care provider and have no medical training. If you have heart palpitations, I have no idea whether the following will work for you. Over the past several days, I've had a rough time with heart palpitations and feeling physically jittery. I was wondering if I was going to turn into one of those people who can't sit still. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it would be a major lifestyle change. Kidding aside, something wasn't right and I really needed to get back to normal. I tried popping potassium pills like candy. I ate more. I doubled up on my iron dose. I went to yoga and even got on the treadmill at 6 AM yesterday. I tried the nuclear option of eating more carbs to stop peeing away minerals. Most of these things helped, but the problem kept coming back. A comment from Galina made me look up epinephrine, one of the drugs my surgeon used to anesthetize me Friday. First, the assistant at the surge

It's going both well and badly. My mouth is healing. It stopped bleeding after a day and the chunk my surgeon removed from the roof of my mouth (the size felt somewhere between a shotgun pellet and a pea) feels like it's mostly grown back. Both sites are still tender, though. I'm talking better; I could barely stand to move my mouth for a few days. And I'm down 4.1 pounds since I started Atkins induction a few days ago. But I spent an uncomfortable day today: my heart was pounding even though I was sitting at my desk having a slow day at work among pleasant coworkers. I popped potassium pills to little avail. My distress could have a few causes: Very low carb diet, which has given me palpitations before. Low blood pressure. Right before surgery--when I was about to have my mouth cut and sewn, and I needed a potassium pill to chill out--it was 97/60. Bleeding for a day and relaxing would have only lowered this number. Low blood sugar. I haven't taken my b

I've run into a problem with Atkins induction: my brand new shorts are now so loose on me that I can get them on without unbuttoning them. Truly, two days ago, nothing in my usual size fit. Cue the sappy violin music. Having to have your clothes taken in isn't the worst problem. What about dental surgery, though? Back in my Body for Life days, I ate a lot of carbohydrate and ended up with a bunch of cavities, a few of them at the gumline of my bottom front teeth. As much as I brushed and flossed, I constantly had plaque on my teeth back then. Even though I haven't had any tooth decay since starting LC, the gumline there (where my old dentist had to remove gum tissue to put in a filling) has receded and I've had bone loss. Gum tissue doesn't stick to fillings, so it just keeps receding. To avoid any further bone loss, my oral surgeon (the one who gave me my dental implant a few years ago after an accident) grafted some tissue from the roof of my mouth to the gum.

Last time I wrote about getting jittery and having a rapid heartbeat on VLC (very low carb). I cut way back on nuts a few weeks ago and felt remarkably better: more energy, and I can tell I lost a little weight because of the way my shoes and watchband fit. As I mentioned, taking a potassium pill helps the jitters and rapid heartbeat, and if it gets really bad, I can just eat a candy bar (we don't have safe starches at work). So for the first time, I tried Atkins induction. Why Atkins induction? It started with shorts. I'd been shopping for shorts and everything was very short (think Officer Jim Dangle on Reno 911 ), wildly patterned, ridiculous (where do you wear lace shorts if you're not starring in a Korean drama?) or knee length. There was even a high-waisted, pleated, acid washed pair from circa 1985. So when I saw a gray pair with sailor pant buttons, I bought them--even though they were pretty short (but not tight). Think Officer Dangle again. Being conscious of wea

A commenter brought up something today that made me think of the radical view that we need to get rid of all industrialization and live like...I don't know what. Following herds that don't exist in any great number and living off the land with skills almost nobody has anymore? Living like Mennonites? Like gentlemen farmers, who (it has been argued) needed slave labor to have the leisure to pursue scholarship and culture? I have nothing against going off the grid if that's what floats your boat, but people who would, say, blow up dams to force other people off the grid remind me of a TV series called Death Note . In the series, a high school student finds a notebook that kills by heart attack anyone whose name is written in it. He starts writing the names of criminals in it because he wants to create a world with only good people in it. "So," someone predicts, "you'll be the only bastard." Sure enough, the student (Kira, taken from the English word f

Dear Trolls, I can't thank you enough for trying to set me and my poor, misguided low-carb and paleo friends on the right path. It must be painful for you to read blogs and articles about eating things like bacon-wrapped shrimp , coconut chocolate tart , juicy barbecued ribs, and full-fat lemon ice cream . Nevertheless, you soldiered on to show us the way to vegan/low-fat/CICO/food reward/MMEL enlightenment. Your kindness and time and effort you've shown are appreciated. But I do have two things to say. First, you're wrong. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there it is. Nearly all of us have already tried eating less and moving more, or reducing calories and fat, and the community is full of former vegetarians. In fact, hunger and fat accumulation are driven by hormones. This isn't the gospel according to Gary Taubes, it's in endocrinology textbooks (see this and this ). High-carb diets aren't the answer to diabetes, a disease of carbohydrate intoler

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm

I love vegetables. There are so many foods that I can't eat that meals would be boring without them. In fact, I like them so much that I planted five kinds of lettuce and two kinds of tomatoes in my garden today. All the same, stuffing yourself with vegetables (or anything else) isn't good. 1. Fibrous vegetables can drive up your blood sugar if you eat enough of them. In one of his books, Dr. Richard Bernstein discussed a patient who ended up with a very high blood sugar after eating a head of lettuce. There are stretch receptors in your intestines that, when they sense you've eaten a big meal, release hormones that can end up raising your blood sugar. Bernstein calls this the Chinese Restaurant Effect. 2. All food is inflammatory. As Michael Eades put i t, Eating is an inflammatory process. A number of scientific studies have shown that eating a meal, regardless of the macronutrient composition, causes acute inflammation, which makes sense when you think about it. F

Coconut in a Can This can of Natural Value coconut milk from Natural Grocers (fka Vitamin Cottage)... ...looked like this... ...and made a gloppy, eggy mess out of a custard dish I've made successfully many times. (I added 3T lime juice to the custard, which I hadn't tried before, but I don't think that would have ruined it.) From now on, it's Thai Kitchen coconut milk or Sprouts premium organic. Thai Kitchen coconut milk (full fat). Sprouts premium organic is similar. Kale Chips Today I ruined a bunch of lacinato kale making kale chips. 500 Paleo Recipes says to cook the chips at 375; some recipes on the web call for 300 degrees when using lacinato kale. They're probably right; at 375, the chips filled the kitchen with smoke and tasted exactly like you'd expect burnt leaves to taste. Red Russian kale has worked well at at the higher temperature, though. With some salt and dip made of mayonnaise, chives and lemon juice, they were way be

I've decided to adopt a troll. What does that mean? Every time the troll leaves some troll dung on a blog I read, I'll donate a dollar to charity. (I'll send a check at the end of the month.) Heifer International seems appropriate. HI provides livestock and other agricultural projects to needy people around the world for income, self-sufficiency and more protein in their diet. An example of their work: One of Heifer International's biggest projects is EADD - the  East Africa Dairy Development  project. It was started in 2008 with a $42.8 million grant from the  Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation . It's helping about 179,000 small-scale dairy farmers to double their incomes. Now, we're happy to announce that we've received a one-year,  $8.5 million grant  from the Gates Foundation to continue that work. The grant will support existing projects in Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda and explore possibilities for expansion in Ethiopia and Tanzania. “We are excited f

Nuts seem like the perfect snack: they're portable, they keep well, they don't need to be cooked, and they're tasty. Problem: I don't feel good when I eat too many of them. Recently, I started snacking on macadamia nuts, which are high-fat, so I thought they wouldn't be a problem. But my stomach was upset, I got a bit of acid reflux and nosebleeds, and generally didn't feel up to par. Nuts have phytates, which bind to zinc and other minerals. This might have caused my nosebleeds. And I don't know what it is about macadamia nuts, but they don't seem to digest well for me; they felt like they were sitting in my stomach causing bloating. I've felt pretty much the same way eating more than a little bit of nuts or goodies made with nut flour. It could be that nuts are seeds and don't "want" to be eaten. Like grass seeds, they defend themselves by sickening those who ingest them. 

After four years eating mostly real food, I'm having the opposite of junk food cravings. For awhile now, a lot of foods have no longer looked like food to me--noodles, pastry, cake, most snack foods that come in plastic bags. (Cookies and brownies still do.) Later, most fruit didn't smell good. I recently made the mistake of getting some shea butter liquid soap, not noticing "honey-citrus" on the label. It smells bad, but I'm too cheap to throw it out. Pizza has long smelled like a wet dog, which is unpleasant but tolerable, but today the pizza in the break room smelled disgusting. So did the burnt toast. Has anyone else had this experience? I never imagined I'd prefer steak tartar to pizza, but steak tartar looks, smells and tastes great to me. A bonus: I've never eaten anything that sat so easily on my stomach. I get full, but it's like there's nothing in my stomach. Steak tartar and salad with Doreen's dressing. Recipes from 500 Paleo