KetoLife: Dr. Atkins’ Fat Fast Diet

You may have heard the term ‘fat fasting.’ Maybe you think it’s a kind of fasting. Maybe you think it is fasting from fat, as the low-fat diet advocates seem to want. But the truth is, Fat Fasting is a kind of temporary diet, used by Dr. Robert Atkins with his patients who had hit a weight-loss plateau. That is, they were continuing to do low-carb but the weight loss they were expecting had stopped.

‘Fat Fasting’ is not fasting at all. It is a kind of low-carb and low-calorie diet, based on some scientific research, that helps some low-carbers. It usually calls for 4-5 mini-meals a day, which have to be composed of certain percentages of the macronutrients. Dr. Atkins might have had people eating 4 to 5 handfuls of macadamia nuts on a Fat Fasting diet day.

Dana Carpender, author of many low-carb cookbooks, has two cookbooks out especially for the Fat Fasting diet. These recipes open up the Fat Fasting diet, and give you a lot of choices for your mini-meals. You still can’t do the Fat Fasting diet for too long at a time— it’s meant to be temporary. (That’s why we can call it a ‘diet’— it’s not our lifestyle!) Get her Fat Fasting books to learn more about Fat Fasting.

Many modern Ketonians don’t use the Fat Fasting diet, but use actual fasting to deal with weight-loss plateaus. Dr. Jason Fung has some books out, including The Complete Guide to Fasting, which can help you learn more about how to use real fasting safely and effectively.

But sometimes the Fat Fasting diet may be what you want to do. Maybe you are having a hard time getting into deep ketosis, or staying there. Maybe you just have a hard time not eating anything at all— or you live with loved ones who will get frantic if you skip even one meal, no matter how heavy you are.

I have tried the Fat Fasting diet a few times, before I got Dr. Jason Fung’s book on real fasting, and it worked, though I’m lazy enough to like the break from actual cooking you get while you are real-fasting. I also use a few recipes from the two Fat Fasting books in my regular low-carb life. A few I adapt— the two mac-and-cheese recipes call for shirataki noodles, which I dislike, so I use a good serving of green beans or perhaps canned bean sprouts as a substitute for the noodles.

The advantage of the Fat Fasting recipes is that most are single-serving recipes— which is grand if you are cooking low-carb for one and don’t fancy eating the same meal again and again. And the recipes are high in percentages of fat, which is good if some of your regular low-carb foods are also too low in fat. (Remember, fat in your food is what makes you not-hungry!)

KetoLife: You Need to Cook

One unpleasant fact of Keto living is that you need to do home-cooking. You can’t just go out for Keto food! Restaurants, especially fast-food ones, are notorious carb-pushers. Your burgers come with buns, and urgings to order fries and a sugary soft drink. Kentucky Fried no longer has the low carb roasted chicken, but the new menu looks to be rich in carbs, as well as requiring a biscuit. I think they made you pay for the biscuit whether you actually get the biscuit or not.

We have a societal inhibition about home cooking. Men don’t want to do it because it’s traditionally women’s work. Women don’t want to do it because we are brought up thinking we have to be good feminists and doing women’s work instead of delegating it to a man is bad feminism. But we have to man up (or woman up) and realize that eating the product of food processors every day is too bad for us to be sustainable. Do we want to be fat, diabetic and/or have Alzheimer’s disease?

To learn Keto (low-carb) cooking you need to have keto recipe books. Yes, actual books. Preferably NOT on Kindle, as you don’t want to spill low-carb gravy on your Kindle. Not every ‘low-carb’ cook book is good. I have one I bought on sale years ago that has not one recipe that is actually low-carb. It’s more of a ‘moderate carb’ approach.

The best book to start with is not a recipe book at all, but Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution, which has recipes in the back. The advantage to this old book is that it came along before there were any low-carb specialty food in the stores. The problem with low-carb specialty foods is that the companies that make them go out of business whenever low-carb popularity dips, and so you are stuck finding substitutes for ‘Carb Countdown dairy beverage’ in your recipes.

Dr. Atkins’ first book came out before any of that (1972) and his patients had to get regular food ingredients from regular grocery stores. And the advantages of the recipes in that first book is that they are well known in the low-carb community. The trickiest recipe in the book is the Diet Revolution Rolls a bread substitute, which require separating eggs and whipping the egg whites. There are actual YouTube videos that show how to make Diet Revolution Rolls!

YouTube videos are actually a great way to improve your cooking/baking skills. You can also Google (or DuckDuckGo) any cut of meat you want to cook and get instructions. Don’t know how to make pork chops or a ribeye steak? Google! (Duck!) You can learn no matter how hopeless you are. And if you have no internet access, try your local library. My small-town library has internet connected computers you can use for free for a  hour.

Dr. Atkins also has a lot of recipe books out. The two I use most are the two earliest, Dr. Atkins Diet Cookbook (1974) and Dr. Atkins New Diet Cookbook (1994). The first contains a very simple recipe for ‘cream sauce’ (like white sauce) and ‘mushroom sauce’ (can sub for cream-of-mushroom soups). Later Atkins books often have recipes which call on ingredients that are specialty products from Atkins corporation that are no longer available.

When you are ready to go beyond Dr. Atkins approved recipes, we have two cookbook authors that are dedicated to low-carb/keto: Dana Carpender and Maria Emmerich. Both have co-written cookbooks with low-carb health podcaster Jimmy Moore, both have a number of cook books available. Look on Amazon.com or your favorite online book seller and pick one that sounds good.

A final note: how many recipes do you, personally, need? My aunt Pat who loves to try new recipes all the time would need a lot. My mother tends to stick with a smaller number of ‘tried-and-true’ recipes. I myself prefer to be in a rut, making the same few meals most of the time. How many good keto recipes do you need? Don’t settle for the first few you try if you only eat them because they are ‘diet’ food and you are on a ‘diet.’ Keto/low-carb food should taste great! Try new recipes until you find ones you like.

How to detox after a carb-eating binge

One of the things most people don’t know when they start a ketogenic or low-carb diet is that you have to STAY on it. The diet changes over your metabolism so you are burning fat rather than glucose. When you overindulge in foods not on your diet— even when quantities are small— it has a big effect.

Why? Because you have changed your metabolism back, and you will have carb-cravings until you change it back. You will start experiencing hunger. After being on keto and never feeling hunger, that will be hard. And you will have a bunch of symptoms because of your indulgence— a carb-eating hangover.

I ate carbs for some days because of my niece’s wedding (and other stresses), and now it’s time for me to detox. I looked up some info on how to do it, and here is my plan. I hope it will help others.

• Drink lots of water. If your tap water tastes bad and filters don’t help, try drinking cups of plain hot tea. I mean real tea, like Lipton, not tea with flavorings, herb ‘tea’, pre-sugared tea mix. Black, green and white tea are OK. My favorite is Prince of Peace brand pu-erh tea.
• DON’T drink juices or fruit smoothies. These items are full of ‘natural’ sugars, and they are just as bad for you as eating white sugar out of the bag.
• Go back to an Induction level low-carb plan as in the Atkins diet books, where you cannot have fruit, nuts, nut flours or other more carby foods.
• Don’t eat all the veggies allowed on Atkins Induction while you are detoxing. Pick veggies like spinach or broccoli, raw or cooked plain. I’m planning to use wild greens like dandelions for my greens allowance.
• Eat enough fat. Perhaps try some of the recipes in Dana Carpender’s Fat Fast cookbook— but don’t limit your portions as in the Fat Fast (temporary) diet. You have to get back on your regular keto first.
• Expect to feel bad, or to have food cravings.
• Don’t exercise if you are feeling symptoms, or do mild exercise like taking a walk.
• A lot of things I have read say not to feel guilty over your carb binge. I disagree. If you KNOW keto works for you and is healthy for you, and you have an unplanned carb binge anyway, you made a mistake and you hurt your health and you should have a little guilt in there because of it. A little guilt can keep us from making the same mistakes over again.
• Make plans to avoid future carb binges— perhaps bringing some foods with you when you travel. Now, you CAN plan to eat some carb food you used to love on certain special occasions, but you have to have a plan or it will turn into a week-long or month-long carb binge.

In conclusion— while a carb binge can be bad, all you have to do is get busy detoxing and you will recover. Your keto diet is not doomed by your carb binge. Hey, if I can (mostly) stick to it, anyone can.

Grocery Shopping on Food Stamps

If you lavish your food on the hungry
    and satisfy the afflicted;
Then your light shall rise in the darkness,
    and your gloom shall become like midday;

Isaiah 58:10 NABRE (Catholic Bible)

How do you shop for groceries when you are on Food Stamps (A US poverty program that provides benefits for food only)?

It’s not easy. Especially when you realize that while food prices are skyrocketing, Food Stamp benefit amounts are decreasing.

At this point I’ll admit, I’m on Food Stamps myself. I have Asperger Syndrome (autism spectrum disorder), and I’m on SSI disability though I should qualify for Social Security disability as the adult child of a worker, but I foolishly spend many years trying to become an employed citizen instead of a disability case (in the govt’s opinion.)

When I first got on Food Stamps a few years back, I got $200 a month and had a hard time making that stretch to the whole month. Now after some benefit cuts I think my last Food Stamp amount was $160 (it varies for no real reason) and there is a new cut in Michigan yet to come.

For people on disability, this is supposed to be your whole food budget for the month. The monetary benefits are just for things like rent or property tax, home heating, electricity and such. (You are supposed to somehow get soap, detergents, new second-hand clothes and replacement appliances out of the air.)

So how do you cope with the Food Stamp life?

Get Over the Shame

It’s horrible and oppressing to be on Food Stamps or any poverty program. The first time I went shopping to my local grocery store with my Food Stamp card, I couldn’t bear the thought of the grocery clerk knowing I was a bum on welfare. But I had no choice but to go through it.

And then, there was the first time I bought frozen shrimp or a cheap cut of steak— important because I’m doing low-carb. There are all these rumors about welfare recipients buying steak every night. (But then we’d have to go without food for 3 weeks in the month.)

Then there are the faux conservatives and faux Christians who love to post pictures of fat women holding little kids and claiming they are Food Stamp/welfare recipients, and suggesting that such women be shot or at least starved for daring to be fat while on welfare.

Face it folks, lots of poor people are fat BECAUSE they are poor and eat a lot of high-carb cheap food like ramen noodles, rice-a-roni and Hamburger Helper (perhaps without the hamburger). Eating like this makes you fat, and it damages your ability to handle carbs. It causes you to crave MORE carbs. And since the government’s solution to overweight is to eat MORE complex carbs, most fat people (rich or poor) can’t fix their weight problem even if they had unlimited access to ‘diet’ food.

Have a Plan

You can’t shop like you always have while on Food Stamps or a tight budget. You can’t buy what you like. Here are some rules that have helped me:

1. Go on a low-carb way-of-life. Go to a thrift shop and buy an old Atkins diet book, or look up the basics online. This way of eating kills your appetite after a few days.
2. No beverages. No soda, juices, coffee drinks, milk, milk substitutes (soy ‘milk’). Tea from tea bags is OK if you reuse the teabags (I get 3-4 servings out of mine most days, sometimes 5).
3. No candy, chips, cookies or other snack foods.
4. Read labels. Sometimes store brands have the same ingredients, sometimes not. A generic stevia sweetener at Family Dollar contains maltodextrin (a sugar) while the Truvia national brand and the Walmart store brand lack this. Go for the Walmart brand!
5. Get it a good rut. I have a low-carb tuna casserole recipe (well, 2) that I could eat nearly every day. So I stock up on the ingredients I need for it when they are on sale or when I can get to a Walmart.
6. Drink lots of water. If your tap water is nasty, get a filter pitcher like Brita or Zerowater. Sometimes when you think you are hungry, you really are just thirsty.
7. If you are not a small child, go with 2 meals a day. (If you are on low-carb, this won’t make you hungry.) Or have one or even two minimalist meals and then a good larger meal.
8. Consider other resources: a family member with money who invite you to dinner sometimes, food from a garden, picking dandelion and clover from your (unsprayed) yard for cooked greens, and food banks.
9. At the end of the month, if you have been frugal enough with your Food Stamps and have some money left over, you can buy a small something that you’ve been craving, such as a bottle of diet soda or low-carb snack food.

Food Banks

What fresh hell is this? It’s what you have to consider when you are poor and/or disabled. I was lucky enough that my therapist, who is also a pastor, works with the local mid-county food bank and he was able to encourage me to go.

This is what the food banks in my area are like: they are restricted to residents of the local area only, so there is only one food bank I’m allowed to go to.

They have mostly unhealthy food I can’t eat like cereals, often sugary cereals, Hamburger Helper, rice-a-roni, even ramen noodles (Please, never give ramen noodles to a food bank! They are cheap enough most poor people can buy them on their own if they really want to abuse their bodies with them.)

Canned tuna, when they have it, they limit to one to a ‘customer’. One day I got a frozen ham, another time some frozen venison. They get venison from deer hunted on crop damage permits. My therapist arranged for me to get a whole deer through the food bank once, which is a big help except I’m only beginning to learn to cook venison.

Conclusion:

So, this is my way of shopping on Food Stamps. I hope it helps people in need, and awakens compassion in people who are financially more blessed.

And if you are the sort of person who is angry at evil ‘welfare’ recipients including the disabled, please spare the effort of telling me I am lazy, that my autism spectrum disorder means I’m a spoiled child and my parents didn’t spank me enough, and that I ought to get a job EVEN IF I’d lose my Medicaid and I’d have to do without medical care and prescriptions for my kidney failure and diabetes, and die.

(I think God has a purpose for my life and don’t want to commit suicide at this time. Or ever. Even if it would save the govt money for me to be dead— the savings would only go to more vacations for Obama anyway.)

So if you are that angry guy, don’t bother post hate-y comments that will just get deleted, and read your Bible. I’d suggest starting with the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.).

Low-Carb Recipe: Cloud Bread/Diet Revolution Roll

Cloud bread baked in muffin top pan.

Haven’t done any low-carb lifestyle posts in a while. Very neglectful of me. So here’s what I’ve been making recently.

In the original Atkins diet book published in 1972, there is a recipe called ‘Diet Revolution Rolls’ consisting of separated eggs, cottage cheese and  a pince of cream of tartar, total carbs 3.1 for the whole batch of six rolls.I tried a couple of times but it never turned out well until I bought a muffin top pan. Since I don’t have a working full-size oven, I use a convection oven and so had to buy a four muffin-top size pan to fit.

This improved the rolls quite a bit, but since I put the full batter in the four slots I guess it came out a little thick.

So I Googled. And I found a recipe for ‘Carb Free Cloud Bread’ http://www.food.com/recipe/carb-free-cloud-bread-411501.  It has the SAME ingredients but there are some differences in how you make it. First, that you make 10 ‘rolls’/bread pieces instead of the 6 of the Diet Revolution Bread recipe.  Second, that you cool the bread pieces, put them in a large baggie or some Tupperware, and refrigerate overnight to make it more ‘bready’

So I tried it myself and am working to refine my own version of the recipe. Here’s the preliminary version:

Basic Cloud Bread

 

Cloud bread in my muffin top pan

3 eggs, separated

3 Tablespoons cottage cheese or cream cheese, made from WHOLE milk, not low-fat or fat-free.

1/4 cream of tartar

1 packet (2 teaspoon equivalent) stevia sweetner, WITHOUT maltodextrin (read labels— Truvia and Walmart store brand are OK so far, Family Dollar store brand has the maltodextrin.)

Oven: 300 degrees.

Separate the eggs into 2 bowls. Not one speck of yolk can get into the white. If you are new to separating eggs, have a third bowl to separate the egg whites in to. That way you only ruin one egg white if you get yolk in. Set the egg white bowl with the 3 whites aside.

Add the cottage cheese or cream cheese to the yolks, and the stevia packet. Use a mixer or a hand blender to mix well. (You will either have to wash the blades well, or else use a hand blender for this step and a mixer for the next.

Now, set the yolk mixture aside and get out the egg whites. Add the cream of tartar. Then, beat the eggs with a mixer for a LONG time. Set your timer to 5 minutes. You want the egg whites to form fluffy white peaks.

Mix the yolk mixture very carefully into the whites. Stir just enough to mix well.

Now, prepare your muffin top pans. You must have enough pans for your ten bread pieces. If you don’t have enough muffin top pans, use a plain cookie sheet for the rest of the slices. Spray the pans with non-stick cooking spray (I prefer olive-oil based sprays).

Use a soup spoon or other larger spoon to spoon out the mixture into the pans. Do it one spoonful into each slot and then start over to add the second spoonful. Try to distribute it evenly. Using your spoon, smooth the mixture so that each one is an even round the diameter of a hamburger bun (this is where the muffin top pan makes it easy.)

Bake in a preheated 300 degree Fahrenheit over for about 30 minutes. The time can vary— check near the end of the 30 minutes. Breads should be the color of a store bought hamburger’s bun.

Put the bread pans somewhere safe to cool. You can take them off the pan if you like. When the breads are wholly cool, put them in an airtight plastic bag or plastic container.

Use 2 of the breads to make sandwiches of all sorts, use them as buns for hamburgers or hot dogs. You can even buy take-out burgers and switch the nasty, sweet buns that they come with for these breads.

Carb count (cottage cheese version)

Whole batch: 3.1

Each bread piece: .31

Variations:

Add things like a bit of minced onion, sauted, or some caraway seeds or poppy seeds.

Cloud bread on an ordinary cookie sheet. (Excuse the foil lining, it’s a bad idea unless your cookie sheet is old and nasty, like mine.)

Cloud bread is good for low carb lifestyles and is also gluten-free. It’s not quite kosher on Paleo, unless you decide to do a ‘modified Paleo’ which allows dairy and sets severe limits on the fruits (because of the carbs).

It is a good daily bread. If you have children, don’t buy ordinary bread for them even if you are compelled to feed them too many carbs in other parts of their daily diet. Get them used to low-carb daily bread and other staple foods of the low-carb lifestyle.

For Ketogenic diets: this is low-carb enough, but only 4% fat. If you are on the ‘fat-fast’ diet for the moment, you’ll probably end up with only one of the breads to make room for the higher fat items that you’ll want to eat with it. The fat-fast diet is a temporary, very restricted diet for people on a strict low-carb lifestyle (such as Atkins Induction or Bernstein’s Diabetes Diet) who have not been losing weight on it. For more info, read Dana Carpender’s Fat Fast Cookbook. http://www.amazon.com/Fat-Fast-Cookbook-Recipes-Weight/dp/0970493126

 

This Diabetic is Kicking the Drug Habit

OK, it’s like this: ever since I was diagnosed with diabetes a few years back, I have been on from one to two oral diabetes medications (metformin and Actos). When I developed kidney complications I have been on from one to two high blood pressure drugs (lisinopril and amlodipine). Even so, I’ve had to at least partially follow a low carbohydrate diet to get decent blood sugar readings.

And then my latest kidney test comes along, and my kidney doctor gets to shrilly screaming on the phone to my real doctor (who’s a nurse) that I have to quit both my diabetes drug and my high blood pressure drug AT ONCE!!! and so I’m kicking the drug habit.

Luckily I know about low-carb dieting as an aid in controlling diabetes. There are a lot of myths about the LC diet— that it’s a fad diet (the first diet book published was low carb, Banting’s Letter on Corpulence), or that it’s high in fat or has too much protein (actually I eat less fat, and smaller portions of protein foods, when I’m strict LC).

The major books I use to guide me (since there are no doctors around here that I can get to that know low-carb) are:

Atkins Diabetes Revolution (Robert C. Atkins, M. D.)

Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution (Richard K. Bernstein, M. D.)

Dr. Bernstein’s diet is a little stricter, and so I go mostly by that, though if there are foods Bernstein bans but Atkins allows (like raw carrots), I feel free to consume in small quantities if I don’t go over Dr. Bernstein’s carb limits.

The Results:

My blood pressure has immediately gone down to very good levels. My blood sugars are not yet great, BUT they are better than they were on pills and a half-hearted approach to low-carb dieting.

My Low-Carb Breakfast this morning:

I was in the mood for an ultralight breakfast this morning. So I had some celery sticks which I spread with spreadable Gouda cheese which I bought in the specialty-cheese section of the grocery store in Menominee, MI, which is where my mother lives. I also had a cup of low-carb hot chocolate. The recipe was based on one in an Atkins recipe book. That one called for 1/3 cup heavy whipping cream, 2/3 cup water, 1 teaspoon unsweetened cocoa powder and a bit of an allowed artificial sweetener. And then you gotta put in in a pot and heat it on the stove for a bit. My recipe is easier— I make it in a styrofoam cup.

Nissa’s Hot Chocolate:

Heat water up in tea kettle or whatever you use to make water for tea.

In your cup, place 1 teaspoon cocoa and 1 to 2 Splenda tablets to sweeten (Or whatever sweetener YOUR preferred Low-Carb book allows).

Pour about 3/4 cup hot water in cup and stir.

Pour about 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream in cup and stir again.

(If you like your hot chocolate really HOT you may have to resort to the kettle method.)

Net carbs of the original Atkins hot chocolate was 5, so this should come in at about 3-4 grams of carb depending on how much cream you use.