What Do I Eat? 1

This is in response to those of you who somehow got the idea that Atkins is the All-Bacon, All-the-Time Diet, or that low-carb involves excessive amounts of protein, or that low-carbers don’t eat vegetables.  Here’s what my husband and I had for dinner the other night – it’s a fairly typical meal for us.

• 6 oz. tuna steaks seared in a little olive oil and served with a piccata-style sauce of white wine, lemon juice, lemon zest, about half a pound of capers (exaggerating! but only slightly), garlic, and butter; garnished with chopped parsley and chopped red onion.
• Liberal amounts of broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, and a little bit of carrot, sauteed in a combination of olive oil, butter, and coconut oil, and topped with parsley and red onion (hey, I chopped more than I needed for the tuna).  I didn’t measure, but I used half a bunch of broccoli, about a quarter of a cauliflower, maybe an 8-inch zucchini, and one or two 4- or 5-inch carrots.  Between us, we ate about 2/3 of it.  So we probably ate about 1 1/2 to  2 cups of veggies each.  That’s three or four servings of vegetables in one meal.
• Small glass of white wine.

When I eat a meal like that, I sometimes wonder whether some of the hostility toward low-carbing is just plain jealousy on the part of the low-fat, low-calorie crowd.  I mean, really, which would you rather eat – my dinner, or a frozen Weight Watchers meal?  My meal was all real food, it was tastier, it had more variety, and there was more of it.

Recommended Reading 2: How I Gave Up My Low-Fat Diet

I often recommend Dana Carpender’s How I Gave Up My Low-Fat Diet and Lost Forty Pounds to low-carb newbies. The book has several virtues: it gives a clear, if somewhat oversimplified, view of how the low-carb lifestyle works; it discusses the pros and cons of different low-carb regimens; and Carpender writes in a chatty, friendly voice that many people will find appealing.

The book has a couple of shortcomings, though. First, Carpender doesn’t cite her sources. She’ll say things like, if you consume just one can of Coke per day and eat no other sugar, you’re getting more sugar than the Victorians did. Now, that is a really cool little factoid, and I have a hard time resisting the temptation to trot it out whenever someone suggests that I should eat carbs in moderation. But I wish I knew Carpender’s source, in case I’m ever challenged.

Second, Carpender is addicted to exclamation points, which drives me batshit!!!!!!! Dana, we can tell you are enthusiastic by your bright, witty writing style. Lay off on the excessive punctuation, won’t you, dear?

(My review of this book is of the first edition, and I know that Carpender has expanded and revised the book since then. So I hope she has corrected these deficiencies.)

Overall, though, I’d say that this is an accessible introduction to the low-carb lifestyle. But I must lay emphasis on the word “introduction.” Because Carpender is summarizing several popular plans, she does not have the space to go into all the details about how each diet works. For this reason, once you’ve selected one or two plans that interest you, you owe it to yourself to read the books that Carpender summarizes.