Lowcarbezine! 17 November 1999

Welcome to the first issue of Lowcarbezine, from Hold the Toast Press!!
Hope you enjoy it!  We welcome your comments, testimonials, questions,
product recommendations, and recipes.

Please feel free to forward Lowcarbezine to your friends and family,
provided that you send it in its entirety.  Let your friends know that
they can subscribe to Lowcarbezine for FREE at:
http://www.holdthetoast.com .

Thought for the Week:

Surely you know the Serenity Prayer:  God grant me the serenity to
accept things I cannot change, strength to change the things I can, and
the wisdom to know the difference.  This is a very important prayer for
those of us seeking to improve our bodies.

On the one hand, I've heard people claim that since obese people don't
necessarily eat more than slim ones, and the regain rate
for diets is over 95%, changing your eating habits is useless, and you
shouldn't even try.  Nonsense!  If what we ate had
nothing to do with what we weigh, there wouldn't be varying obesity
rates from state to state,, and between socio-economic classes,  and
people from other countries wouldn't start getting fat when they moved
here and adopted our  sugar-and-white-flour saturated diet.  And the
regain rate is largely attributable to people going on a diet with the
idea that they will lose the weight and then go off the diet.  If you go
back to eating the way you used to eat, you *will* go back to weighing
what you used to weigh, no question about it!

On the other hand, it's important to know what you can change through
diet and exercise, and what you cannot.  I have lost 50
pounds, and I'm edging into a size 10!  But I  seriously doubt I will
ever fit into a size 6; I'm simply not built for it.  I'm
short and stocky, with a big ribcage and The World's Shortest Waist
(Thanks, Dad! ;-D )  All the diet and exercise in the world will not
make me a tall, delicate, willowy girl.  If I told myself, "It's all
useless, since I'll never look like Cindy Crawford", I could let myself
get back up to 190 pounds very, very fast.  Instead, I'm thrilled with
what I *have* been able to change!

Be the best you you can be, work on what you *do* have control over, and
don't worry about what you can't change.

Frequently Asked Question:

Isn't this an all meat diet?  How can that be healthy?

This is one of the most common misconceptions about a low carb diet, and
one that I'm afraid many of the leaders in the low carb field haven't
handled too well.   Dr. Atkins protested recently that vegetables
weren't needed for health (true on one level, extremely questionable on
another), while the Hellers have people convinced that broccoli is high
carb, which is most emphatically is not.  (It has about the same carb
count as green beans, which they consider a low carb vegetable.  Go
figure.)

A low carb diet is not, and was never meant to be, a NO carb diet.  Even
during its most restrictive Induction phase, for instance, the Atkins
diet allows 2 cups a day of low carb vegetables, which is far more than
the average American is eating.  And many low carbers eat low carb
vegetables in pretty much whatever quantities they want, to good
effect.  There's no reason in the world you can't have peppers and a few
onions (easy on the onions, they're a borderline veg)  in your scrambled
eggs for breakfast, put celery in your tuna salad at lunch, and serve it
on a bed of lettuce, or stuffed into a tomato, and have mushrooms on
your steak and broccoli on the side with your dinner -- even all in the
same day.

It's not even true that you can't have any fruit on a low carb diet,
although more fruits are high carb than are vegetables.
Strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, cantaloupe,
honeydew -- all these are very low carb fruits.  Grapefruit is
about 10 g a half, and a fresh peach is about the same, a plum is
slightly less.  You don't want to pig out on fruit, but a 2"
wedge of melon, or a half-dozen strawberries for dessert is just fine.

You do, of course, want to be aware of the few high carb vegetables --
things like peas, corn, winter squash, and potatoes
-- but that should just be part of an ongoing policy of knowing
approximately what the carb count is of everything you eat.  Get
a food count book, and use it!  Knowledge is power.

What about that assertion that "You can be healthy without vegetables"
is, on one level, true?  Well, the Eskimo ate just
about no vegetables in the winters, although they ate fruits and
vegetables in season (short season!), and they didn't get any
horrible deficiency diseases.  But then, they ate a lot of their meat
raw, and ate all the organs and such, as well as the muscle
meats. Also, despite not having heart attacks or diabetes or obesity or
rotten teeth, they didn't necessarily live to great ages -- easy to die
of an accident living where it's that cold -- so we don't know about
some diseases that come with age. I'm not sure it's a good idea to base
our diet completely on the diet of the Eskimo.

There is considerable evidence that vegetables have very valuable
phytochemicals along with their vitamins and minerals, and they also add

far more variety, volume, and fiber to your diet for the carbs they
carry than anything else could.  Further, while it has now been shown
that fiber, in and of itself, does not prevent colon cancer, eating
vegetables -- a very specific source of fiber -- seems to.  So eat your
low carb veggies!

Don't know which low carb diet is for you?  Hate boring, confusing
medical jargon?  Read the low carb book that gives you plenty of
options, and is FUN to read!  How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet and Lost
Forty Pounds! Everybody's Guide To Low Carbohydrate Dieting, by Dana
Carpender.  http://www.holdthetoast.com -- Now available at Amazon.com,
too!



Product Review of the Week:

Sad news, low carbers!  Wasa Fiber Rye has had a change of recipe, and
is now higher in carbs. WAAAAAH!  However, I've been eating a brand of
crackers called Fiber Rich, which have 6 g of carb per serving (about 2
crackers) -- and *all six grams* are fiber!  Yep, they're just bran
stuck together.  Wish I knew how.  (I'll work on a recipe!)

Anyway, they're not brilliant alone, but with a little butter and salt
they're okay.  (Butter and salt improves everything, doesn't
it?)  And they're really nice for scooping up tuna salad, or with dips.
(Holiday dip recipes soon!)  Crunchy!

I get them at my health food store, and yours should be able to
special-order them for you. (Tell them that if they put a big label on
the shelf that says "Low Carb/High Fiber Crackers! they'll sell a
million of 'em.)  They're  made in Norway, and imported by A.V. Olsson
Trading Co. Inc., Greenwich CT, 06831.

Check 'em out!

That's it for the first issue of Lowcarbezine, folks!  Hope you enjoyed
it!

Dana W. Carpender
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