The AF L-C Diet - CHAPTER FOUR: HOW YOU CAN BENEFIT BY THIS DIET
Having come this far, and having glanced at the recipes and menus that follow, you know that this diet will not call upon you for heroism above and beyond your strength of character. Once you have trained yourself to edit out the extra carbohydrates, your food allowance is so liberal and satisfying, and can be so interesting, that it can give rise to another sort of problem.
Recently a group of teachers in a suburban school decided to try the low carbohydrate diet together, so that they could draw on each other for moral and technical support and enliven their menus by exchange of recipes. By the end of the first week they had all lost between three and six pounds, and by the end of the third week most of them had put in happy hours taking in their skirts and shifts. But one young second-grade teacher continued to appear in her pre-diet wardrobe, unaltered, though her mirror must have told her that she looked baggier every day. Finally a colleague, who knew Miss X wasn’t much of a hand with a sewing machine, made a tactful offer of help.
“It’s not the sewing!” Miss X burst out. “I’ve always had to pay for alterations and I don’t mind that. I’m just afraid to believe it, that’s all. I’m three inches less around the hips but I just know that the minute I get those skirts taken in those inches will be back. Nobody can take off weight this easily!"
Miss X was suffering from her American heritage of post-Puritan conscience: it can’t be good for you unless it hurts.
Well, this diet is good for you, and it’s good for your figure, and it will hurt less than any reducing regimen you’ve ever tried. You’ll never go hungry. It is also very easy to apply because it’s loaded with foods that have probably always formed the mainstay of your menu – meats, fish, poultry, eggs, cheese that you like to eat.
But if, like Mix X, you can’t accept happiness without knowing that it’s going to cost you something – relax. It will require some effort at first. If you are an old-line dieter, you probably do not realize how conditioned you are to the calorie-counting dogma. It takes a tricky bit of mental adjustment to stop thinking of calories as little horned men with pi8tchforks at the ready, just waiting for you to glance at Beef Stroganoff on a menu.
The best way to do it is to stop thinking about calories altogether. Think in terms of grams. The diet list is set up that way, as are the long food charts which have been appended to make it simple for you to keep your menu varied, yet still within your 60-gram limit. Food elements translate very easily from grams to calories. When you eat 1 gram of carbohydrate, remember, you’re getting 4 calories; 1 gram of protein, 4; 1 gram of fat, 9. But don’t translate. The reason for this is simple but crucial. This diet is carefully balanced to maintain a proportion of carbohydrate to protein and fat. It reduces carbohydrate, but supplies you with fat and protein to perform their own functions and also to fill in for the carbohydrate you’ve cut down. When you allow yourself to think in terms of calories – particularly of calories of fat – you tend to worry about how many you’re taking in. Almost involuntarily you start holding back, butting down on everything, trapped again by the calorie-counter’s credo that if less is good, much less must be better. Shortly you are hungry, fretful, easily tired. You blame it on the diet, but the fault is yours because you have not played by the rules. You must have the protein to feed your muscles, bones, and tissues; you must have the fat for energy, for satiety, for keeping the body supple, for production of fatty acids.
Forget the total amount
Forget the total amount you are eating of the foods you are allowed. Concentrate only on the carbohydrate-loaded foods; they are the only ones you need to worry about.
So you see, though you may eat with sinful-seeming freedom, you will still be in a position to worry if worry you must.
You can also worry, in a very minor way, about drinking. Needless to say, if you have a Drinking Problem, you have more to worry about than your weight, and this book will not be of much help. But if you are only concerned with the odd glass, the ritual cocktail hour, or the big party, a glance at the Alcoholic Beverage Chart will cheer you. It has never before been know to cheer dieters, because 1 gram of alcohol contains 7 calories. But we said you could drink on this diet, and we meant it. As the table shows, the number of carbohydrates per average drink is comparatively low, with the exception of beer, ale, sweet wines, and liqueurs. This admits liquor, within reason and with the discretion which will naturally accompany the thinking man’s drinking even if he is not overweight, to the low carbohydrate dieter’s list of pleasures.
Why, then, do so many non-teetotalers put on weight? For one thing, they eat while they’re drinking. They eat tasty bits of things spread on bread (12 grams carbohydrate per slice) and piled on tiny crackers (much lower, around 3 each, but they still add up by the handful). They eat delightful specialties-of-the-house which have been rolled in breadcrumbs (more than 8 grams per ounce). They eat potato chips unaccountable, which average 2 gram per chip, and they frequently dip these into spreads which have been made with cornstarch or flour.
There is also the possibility, presently under investigation, that because alcohol is absorbed much more swiftly into the system than solid foods, its calories can be immediately utilized to supply some of the body’s energy needs. By the time food calories are available fewer of them are required, and thus more are left over to settle down upon the waistlines of the unwary.
The wise can continue to drink
But as the low carbohydrate dieter is not unwary, he or she may continue to drink so long as it is remembered that while 60 grams of carbohydrate per day are allowed, it would really be rather unwise to take them all in the form of liquor and tidbits. The joys of a nice slice of hot buttered toast with your breakfast egg are not to be belittled. Do you really want to give that up for twelve potato chips?
Attitude and alcohol, then, are two items to think about as you incorporate the low carbohydrate diet into your way of life – and alcohol only because of what often goes with it. Beyond that, you can put yourself on this diet in the time it takes to memorize two simple rules. Keep down your intake of sugars and starches. Keep up your intake of fats and proteins. Remember on this diet, you can eat all you want of the foods that are high in protein and fat as long as they are low in carbohydrates. Best of all to remember – you need never by hungry.
To follow the first rule, it will help to start out by ruling all these off your permitted list:
+ Cakes, cookies, cupcakes
+ Pies, puddings
+ All other desserts made with sugar and/or thickeners such as flour, cornstarch, etc.
+ All canned or stewed fruits, cooked with sugar or syrup
+ All jams, jellies, candies, syrups, hone, sugar
+ All rice and pasta (spaghetti, macaroni, noodles)
+ All dried fruits
+ All biscuits and extra bread
+ Lima beans, corn, peas, okra, potatoes
+ Apples, apricots, bananas, orange juice, peaches, pears, plums, pineapple, watermelon; all berries except strawberries
+ All sweet carbonated drinks
+ All beer and sweet wines
Please note that this is the way you start out. You are not going to have to bear the rest of your years without ever tasting these foods again. The reason you outlaw them just at first is to train your eye and your habits – to learn so well that you know without having to stop and think just which foods deliver the highest number of carbohydrates.
The advisability of vitamin supplements
Meanwhile, your doctor may suggest a vitamin supplement to bolster your intake of vitamin C, the B-complex vitamins, or other nutrients. Check with him as to the advisability of such a supplement.
If you will check the comprehensive Food Values table, you will readily see that most of the foods which have not been prohibited – and that’s most of them! – contain some carbohydrate. Many of the permitted fruits and vegetables contain a fair amount. Unless you stop eating, in the ordinary course of events, you will be taking in a small amount of carbohydrate even with the high carbohydrate items nowhere around. Being allowed a total of 60 grams per day, you begin to juggle and balance.
As you grow adept at the balancing act, you can begin to sneak back into your diet small portions of the outlawed items. Bread, for instance, is the most difficult thing for most weight-watchers to give up. Notice on the preceding list that you have not been asked to give up all bread; only extra bread. What’s extra? That depends on you. You don’t have to punish yourself. By switching from orange to grapefruit juice and cutting down to 2 ounces instead of the usual 4, you can give yourself a breakfast of juice, two scrambled eggs, a slice of buttered toast, and coffee with cream and non-caloric sweetener (the type low in carbohydrate) without taking in more than 18 or so carbohydrate grams, depending on the size of the eggs and the thickness of the bread.
Off to a well-filled start
This sounds like a lot. But you’ve gotten your day off to a sound, well-filled start. Your morning is energetic, cheerful, your imagination constructively occupied with the creation of better money-making schemes instead of being bogged down on the subject of food. You can lunch on an average portion of shrimp – oven fried – plus six or seven stalks of asparagus vinaigrette, and add only 17 grams. This leaves you about 25 grams – if you want to be super-cautious, 20 grams – to play about with at dinner. No bread, plenty of meat, low carbohydrate vegetable or salad if you like, and even a small portion of mashed potato (¼ cup, with butter and milk, will run you only about 6 grams) can be your happy lot, and if you finish off with a nice bit of cheese you might even – depending on the size of your portions of other food – allow yourself a saltine for it to sit upon. Your unsugared or artificially sweetened tea or coffee hardly counts. Starvation? Deprivation? Not by any standard. And as you can see, the juggling possibilities are limited only by your personal tastes. Give up the breakfast juice, confine yourself to one egg, leave the French dressing off your asparagus at lunchtime, and have an extra slice of bread if bread you must have. The beauty of this diet is that, while you must still juggle, at least you’ve got something to juggle.
As you being to reinstate carbohydrate-significant foods to your diet, bear I mind the word portions. The comprehensive Food Values tables are calculated upon so-called “average” portions. As you are allowed to eat more than enough to satisfy you of filling, high protein foods and fats, it involves small sacrifice to keep portions of other foods down to a bit less than average until you have determined at what rate your personal body chemistry can cope with carbohydrates and still keep off excess weight on a long-term, satisfactory basis.
Carbohydrates are the villains
In that last sentence lies a concealed, secret message, and each dieter must work out its meaning for himself. Sixty grams of carbohydrate per day has been set as the maximum which the average individual can allow himself in order to achieve a satisfactory, steady weight reduction. It is here that you start out. As you go on, you may find that you are not losing weight fast enough to keep you happy. In that case, ask your doctor if you can trim down your carbohydrate intake to 50 grams a day, and try a short walk before breakfast. The chances are that if the diet is not working quickly enough to satisfy you, it is not because it is wrong for you but because you haven’t yet discovered the precise proportion of carbohydrate to protein and fat which will work best for you. Taking it down a few grams will usually do the trick – but keep in mind that the danger of ketosis makes it essential that you check with your doctor first.
On the other hand, there are those fortunate types who, having lost as much as they hoped to on 60 grams a day, find that they can start inching upward by minute steps until they are taking in perhaps 65 or more grams a day, while still, like the teen-ager previously cited, retaining their weight loss. It is premature here to emphasize this, because you must start out with 60, but it is nice to know that though this diet is full, satisfying and tasty, you may be one of the lucky ones who can eventually go on to even better things.
Meanwhile, start with 60. Make meat, fish, poultry, and eggs the backbone of your diet. Go cautiously in the direction of all desserts, all flour, potatoes, noodles, rich dishes, all addenda like honey and jam. Shun candy, sweet soft drinks, beer. You must snack between meals? A slice of cheese, a few almonds, an olive or two, dried crisp bacon curls (here is one cocktail-type tidbit you can dip into) should pacify your craving – but face facts, they do add something; you’ll have to either trim the extra grams off something else or, better still, train yourself not to snake. It can be done.
In stews and gravies, experiment. Omit flour and cornstarch thickeners and rely instead on flavor-building spices, herbs and wines to make these items more appealing than ever before. However, don’t lose your head; if, in dining out, you cannot avoid a dish in which some thickener was used, try to eat as much of the solid portion and as little of the sauce as possible – and remember that if two or three tablespoons of flour were used to thicken a stew served to six people, your allotment of it is not really going to be disastrously large.
As a matter of fact, a cook’s tour of favorite recipes will be a remarkably cheering experience for the low carbohydrate dieter. Barring desserts – and barring of course main-dish recipes based on noodles or pasta or other starch – so many of the meat, fish, and poultry recipes that you like can be adapted so easily to this diet that unless you prefer to live simply on plain foods you certainly don’t have to. The menus and recipes included in this book have been organized to show what can be done; they are far from the limit of what you can do, if you have the time, taste, and mind to do it.
Compared to calorie counting, child’s play
On this diet you will eat fully and well. You will reduce quickly down to your own best weight and will at the same time form new eating patterns which will maintain this weight for you easily. You will accomplish this without endangering your health, disrupting your way of life, making yourself anathema to friends and co-workers, or creating soap-opera spectaculars about your sufferings (because there won’t be any) unless you want to. You will avoid depression, low energy, and nervous strain induced by semi-starvation; if you have a nasty temper you will have to find some other excuse to explain it. You can enjoy your liquor like any other civilized human being.
What are you waiting for? |
