No Nicole, Just You

So, I've been doing this low carbohydrate diet thing.  What amazes me is that if I use all the fat I want but cut down to about half the carbs I was eating[1], I still eat the same amount of calories, and according to www.fitday.com, I'm meeting all my dietary needs except Zinc, and I already take a supplement because that seems to be a chronic vegetarian problem.  I am, of course, eating more protein, because I need to get the calories somewhere.  Since I'm a vegetarian, this makes eating out difficult, at least at fast food places.  I'm not hungry all the time, and I seem to be satisfied with a smaller quantity of foods[2].  I have a lot of energy, and I don't have the afternoon slump unless I'm actually short on sleep or I've had a really bad day.  I was having some serious depression, exhaustion and crankiness in the late afternoons.  This really helps.

I have also broken my caffeine addiction.  I can't believe how easy that was.  I was drinking maybe 24 oz of coffee a day, which is quite a bit.  Now, I'm back to where I was a year ago, drinking maybe one cup in the morning (sometimes not, I didn't yesterday) and an occasional ice tea.  When I make ice tea at home, I use the decaf Luzianne anyway because Tino needs the decaf.  If I want a hot beverage at work, I have the decaf.  This is really revolutionary for me.  I used to view the people heading for the decaf carafe as "sissies and little girls."  Now, I'm one of them.

The hard part is that I seem to suddenly have 1001 things to do.  I'm mentally taking on so many tasks that I seem to view everything not on my mental plan as an unwelcome distraction.  This isn't really fair to Tino, since I doubt he can tell this from the old late-afternoon crankiness, and he's not one to make up an agenda in his head.  I guess I should either fill him in on my mental agenda or try to be more flexible.

Overall, my energy level is equal to what I felt when I was taking the diet drugs (minus the black mood crashes, and short-term memory loss), only I'm pretty much...<koff>...substance free.  I can hardly believe this is me saying something stupid like that.  This is not to say that I don't support your right to use recreational drugs, drink coffee, smoke, drink beer, whatever.  I absolutely do.  It's your body, and you should do what you want with it.  I still have a few beers once a week or once every two weeks.  I smoke maybe three cigarettes a week (though I often go for a month without even thinking about having a cigarette).  And, of course, I still have that one cup of caffeine in the morning most days.  Actually, I've been brewing hal-caf at home.

If you're curious which low carb thing I'm doing, it's Diana Schwarzbein's.  I read the Zone book sometime back and found it gimmicky.  I also didn't buy his explanation for why I should follow this diet -- I think it was dumbed down too much.  I read Bob Arnot's book as well, and he has no plausible scientific information, (and I'm not asking much here).  His diet actually allows you to eat all sorts of carbs, as long as they are very low in the G.I. scale.  Really, he seems to be advocating a diet similar to a macrobiotic diet.  Dr. Atkin's diet relies on supplements and is still pretty low fat, and I know I couldn't follow that diet.

Dr. Schwarzbein had a bunch of case studies from her practice as an endocrinologist[3].  Yes, this is anecdotal, but there were a lot of them, and they were all a little different.  They were all people who had damaged metabolisms.  Basically, she sees the low-fat diet advocated by the USDA and FDA as having caused the current epidemic of type 2 diabetes and she supports her argument well.  She advocates limiting only carbs (based on your activity level) and avoiding all sugar- and white flour-containing items as well as trans-fatty acids, stimulants, artificial sweeteners and fake fat.  It's very possible to follow her plan as a vegetarian, and she even offers a vegetarian cookbook (as well as the regular one).  Basically, if you can't gather it, milk it or hunt it, you shouldn't eat it.  I suspect it would be hard to get enough calories as a vegan on her plan, but that doesn't really concern me anyway.

It looks to me like meat-eaters could develop a cholesterol problem on this diet.  She claims that eating cholesterol does not result in high cholesterol counts, but this was the least well supported item on her list.  

In case you haven't guessed by now, this is a "works for me" thing.  You are allowed to think I'm a nut.  I don't care.