If the comments Cory got in BoingBoing are any guide, this comment section will get a lot of vehement posts telling us what idiots we are. Food is a deep subject. However, a week into this, I personally feel fine, aside from the fact that I'd kill for a piece of French bread. Time to drink my fifth or sixth pint of water for the day...

Not having beer on a regular basis really really sucks, and I miss bread. And the f***ing diet goes straight to hell the week of christmas, and at most conventions.

But there is one point. Diet is not enough -- if you aren't burning more than you eat, you won't lose weight. Low carbs corrects a metabolic error that causes your body to store fat before burning it, but it won't help if you eat too much anyway. Fortunatly, for most people, that's not a big issues.

Walking is enough, as long as you do enough.

The really neat thing about the diet is you don't feel as hungry.

BTW, do you have a preference for the kind of vegetable oil?

Back in the 70s, someone once opened a bag of jelly beans two rooms away in the office where I was working, and I smelled it immediately -- Easter mix, heavy on the pinks and whites and citrus colors. My mouth still waters, remembering the hyperreality of that unseen bag of jelly beans.

Dave, I forget whether she used corn, safflower, or canola oil, though if I had to guess it would be canola. Olive would be too strong. The important thing, whatever oil you use, is that it be fresh and of good quality. Your mayonnaise is no better than the oil and eggs you put in it.

There's a lot of information mixed with varying quantities of advertising and hype at atkinscenter.com, including lists of what you can eat when. Plenty of emphasis is placed on the importance of exercise, and even people in their extra-rigorous first two weeks are exhorted to eat their damn vegetables.

I will say that I have never enjoyed modest quantites of salad greens more intensely and in such detail, nor can I recall a quick trip to the supermarket ever being quite such an overwhelming olfactory rush. I could smell white potatoes from twenty feet down the aisle.

Duh.

My trainer confirmed this, so I'm eating a lot of wheat gluten. If I become wheat allergic or come down with celiac sprue like one of my friends, I will lose weight rapidly...as my flesh rots away in my coffin! (I was starting to show signs of gynecomastia, fading rapidly now that I've cut down on soy.)

And I'm also doing a religious thang that involves eating a sweet (yes, a piece of candy) on a daily basis. It's just one, but... I doubt Ganesha takes all the bad carbs out, somehow.

By the way, all my trainers have been saying "high protein, very low carb, moderate fat" for years and years. By 'moderate' they mean "don't even worry about it."

And I was pointing out to someone that the food pyramid (you know, with the giant portions of grain products) was based on absolutely. no. science. at all, and she said "No, it was based on science. It's just that the science was economics."

We're the world's largest grain producer. Again, I say thee "Duh."

You know, you're just feeding my paranoid suspicion that twenty years of bad dietary advice (and if you're a narcoleptic, this stuff really matters) can be laid at the feet of Archer-Daniels-Midland and their ilk. But I find myself thinking of some emphatic vegetarians my in-laws used to know. These guys were very strict -- no milk, no eggs, no nuthin' -- and let the world know about it. I asked my mother-in-law what they ate, then.

"As far as we can tell, they pretty much live on pastry," she said.

Soy fakemeat is intended for vegetarians, but not too bad these days. I haven't eaten packaged (real meat) cold cuts in quite a while, but the soy ones seem fairly plausible to me. Soy burgers, soy sausage (the slice-and-fry kind; the "links" are horrible), even soy chicken nuggets.

There's a fake cream cheese made of soy that I like, though I have to admit I would not attempt to pass it off as the real thing; the flavored ones (like jalapeno) are nice as dips, if you fluff them up a bit.

About Tofutti: when it first came out in the early 80s, it was gross. They hadn't refined the process yet and it was a bit grainy. I just gave up sweetcreamy, then started eating frozen yogurt. But Tofutti today is REALLY GOOD. I can personally recommend the Better Pecan flavor, which is absolutely sinful. Not on the Atkins, I think, because there's a lot of sugar in it (it has swirls of caramelly stuff), but for a splurge...

Mind you, I'm not trying to get you to go veggie. Soy isoflavones have this estrogenic property, so it might help you with that issue, that's all I'm saying.

And I've explored the possibility of going back to meat (at least tuna, you know?), but the signs are bad. Accidentally ate something that had little bits of meat in it a year ago; retched for quite a while on that one. Yuck. As for tuna...well, I'm veggie because of a geas (personal behavior restriction, I'm Pagan, remember?), and so I did some divinations a while back about putting a little tuna in my diet...never saw such strongly negative signs.

I kind of don't dare. Break your geasa and die, usual rule.

Pace dissent above, it should be said that
the Atkins is hardly free of roughage. Even
in the two weeks of the induction phase, the
regimen includes three cups of salad greens
daily, or two cups of greens and one cup of
other vegetables. This is more roughage than
I normally eat when *not* on Atkins, and because
I can't fill up the empty holes on the plate
with bread, rice and peeled potatoes, I actually
do *eat* the vegetables. And, because it's
Atkins, I can have melted butter on my cooked carrots if I wanna. Yum.

On the topic of getting more soy in the diet,
I find I quite like the salted "soy
nuts" that Trader Joe's carries. Dunno about
the carb grams tho. I haven't bought any in
a while and I'm still in induction for another
week. (Oh, wait. I have an old bag here in
my desk: it's 9 grams carb per 1/4 cup.
Definitely not something I can add back for
another couple of weeks.)

I haven't noticed an olfactory jump, yet, but
will keep on watch for it. On the other hand,
I did try one of the sugarless chocolate bars
that use sucralose and find that it only sorta
replaces real chocolate. Weird reason, too.
It tastes just like real chocolate, but the
mouth feel is noticeably cool rather than a
bit warm. My first hypothesis is that enzymatic
digestion of sugars starts in the mouth, and is
very mildly exothermic, and since you can't
break down sucralose because of the switched
carbon bond, you don't get that exothermic
reaction with sucralose. Anybody know more
about the process of sugar digestion?

Odd observation I tripped across recently about
vegetarianism: if you're a vegan for reasons of
protecting animals, you're not succeeding very well if you buy grains harvested by a combine harvester -- i.e. pretty much any grain products at all produced by American agrobusiness.
Apparently the carnage left behind of decapitated
and otherwise mutilated field animals after the
passage of a combine is considerable. And all the
meat is wasted.

Thanks for the recipes and pointers. And the
unwitting solidarity.

I'm agnostic as far as the received dietary wisdom goes. I do think that it's been pushed way too hard on too little evidence, and the food pyramid bugs me because it doesn't distinguish between butter and nuts, or between whole and refined grains. (Also, it's culturally insensitive. Ask a person of East Asian heritage what's wrong with showing a bowl of rice with the chopsticks stuck into it.)

In every diabetes support group I've been on (and I've been on several), one of the mantras is "YMMV," meaning "Your mileage may vary," or, in other words, what works well for one person works for another. I tend to think that people get too worked up about particular rules of eating and lose sight of the big picture. (And I say this as someone who literally has to consider every bite she eats.)

Over the years I've developed some basic advice for healthy eating, based on little more than common sense. Assuming that you don't have any health problems that need to be addressed with diet, I believe that following these basic principles will go a long way towards helping you eat a healthier diet.

1. Eat a variety of whole foods, including some from each of the basic food groups. Don't neglect the fruits, veggies, nuts, and seeds.

2. Avoid eating junk. "Junk" includes highly processed foods, most fast food, foods with lots of added salt or sugar (especially soda pop, the drink of the devil), and foods that contain hydrogenated fat, preservatives, and substances that come from a chemical plant.

3. Eat moderate amounts of food at regular intervals. (In other words: Don't skip meals. Don't binge. Don't stuff yourself.)

4. Enjoy your food. Eat slowly and chew thoroughly. Pay attention to how you feel during and after a meal. Whenever possible, eat with others, in a social setting.

5. Don't beat yourself up if you break one or more of these rules from time to time, on special occasions -- say, a couple of times a month. But if you're making up "special occasions" every day, you need to be more realistic about your eating habits.

That's all. Just my opinion, of course.

Curses! To be found out after all these years!

OOoooOOOoooo, that sounds good. Good. Good.

Got a recipe for us, O Saint Teresa of the Spoon?

Marmalade is a procedure. Take good citrus and cut it up finely, peel and all, removing the seeds as you go. Don't let the juice escape. Slightly underripe fruit is good. More comments on fruit later.

Measure your cut-up fruit. Add an equal amount of water and let it sit for a day, or at least overnight. Now put the fruit and water into a big wide-mouthed pan. Bring it to a boil and cook until the peel is cooked through and is no longer opaque.

Add sugar to equal two-thirds to three-quarters the volume of the cooked fruit and water mixture. Stir to dissolve. Now boil it up briskly, stirring every so often, until it turns into marmalade. Long slow cooking is not the idea here. Neither is burning the marmalade, so don't turn the fire too high and stir it frequently, especially toward the end. It's not a bad idea to turn the fire down when you get to the endgame -- almost-cooked marmalde is damnably easy to burn.

It has turned into marmalade when you can drop a bit of the liquid out onto a hard cold surface, and a little while later it sets up. Some people keep saucers in the freezer to test their preserves. It's not a bad idea.

You will have already prepared an adequate number of glass canning jars -- smaller are better -- with their attendant dome lids and rings. You will have the lids in a little pot of nearly-simmering water, and the shining clean jars standing ready. Ladle the marmalade out into the jars, leaving a half inch or so of head space at the top. Wipe the rings and rim of the jar with a clean cloth or paper towel dipped in very hot water. Fish a lid out of the pot, put it on, and screw a ring down on top of it.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Set your jars to cool in a place where they're not in a cold draft. Wait for the little ringing pops that tells you the lids have gone concave, i.e. your seals are good. Don't disturb the marmalade too much while it's setting up.

I am of the opinion that preserves that go into a jar at a sufficiently hot temperature don't have to be processed in a hot-water bath.

On fruit: Seville oranges are hard to get, and sublime. Dean & DeLuca sometimes has them. Mexican sour oranges are very much like Seville oranges, only much cheaper and not so cosmetically perfect, and you find them at bodegas instead. You'll know you've hit paydirt when the proprietor tries to warn you that they can't be eaten in the normal fashion.

Other oranges, yes, definitely. I prefer Valencias to navels. Blood oranges look very pretty.

If you can find citrons, buy as many for me as you're willing to carry home. (Unless they're hideously expensive ceremonial objects, in which case would you like to discuss trading yours, and your friends' and family's citrons, once you're done with them, in return for a share of the marmalade?)

Lemons make very, very good marmalade. Grapefruit is better than you might think, especially if you get the undersized pink ones. Kumquat makes a bright, tart-flavored marmalade; it's one of my favorites. Limequats work too, and marmalade made from them sets up like a rubber ball. Ugli fruit, sure, fine. All kinds tangerines, tangelos, calamondins, temples, etc. etc. etc., fine. Watch out for the ones that have been dyed.

I like lime marmalade myself, but it's fairly bitter and the peel is tough. I'd parboil the peels before slicing them up and setting them to soak, and I'd cut them up very, very fine.

What doesn't work: Pummelos (giant Chinese grapefruit). They have an odd flavor that just doesn't work. There's also a rare variety of citrus called a lavender gem. They're delicious eaten out of hand, but again, they don't work in marmalade.

Two other notes. First, if you run out of sugar, real maple syrup makes a very interesting marmalade. So does cranberry-orange relish left over from Thanksgiving.

Second, bottle up your marmalade when it's ready. Do not let it sit in the pot and get hard, expecting to be able to re-heat it later. It will have lumps in it.

I'm half done with the smaller, lighter jar. Mmmmmmm! After I've finished it I'll start on the larger, which says "The Meyer of Seville" on the lid, a reference that is largely lost on me.

As for the rest, well, a geas is a geas. At least you're not telling me it's unnatural for humans to eat milk products, which I've always thought was odd given that we're mammals.

Good behavioral stuff, Janet. I'm a great believer in the principle that well-presented food is somehow more satisfying than the same mass & matter slopped out on a plate.

Avram, you got two jars of the best, and are welcome to more. The one labeled "The Meyer of Seville" is made out of Meyer lemons and Seville oranges.

And, if you don't step foot in the place, you'll get a jar of limequat/kumquat marmalade hauled to you in, of all places, Racine, WI.

Then please invite me to your house!

At least you're not telling me it's unnatural for humans to eat milk products, which I've always thought was odd given that we're mammals.

I don't try the nature argument, having learned to despise it in another context. But since my vegetarianism is a geas, how do I know what your geasa are? It MAY be that you're not listening to your inner voice, but it may just as well be that yours is telling you different things than mine does me--and how can I tell? So I never tell people they should go veggie.

I avoid milk primarily for medical reasons.

I think I read that same article, Avram. And lots of other stuff. It's a mutation that goes with white skin, and for the same reason: calcium. (Well, also protein, but...) Vitamin D is produced in the skin and acts to enable calcium absorbtion. When humans decided to try the stupid trick of living in the frozen north, their kids had brittle bones. The pale-skinned freaks didn't, because the sun could get enough energy through to power the formation of vitamin D (the rickets problem happened again when ex-slaves started moving north; ultimately the solution was to add D to milk, which is children's biggest source of calcium).

The mutation that allows European-descended people to digest lactose in adulthood has, I suspect, a similar origin. People who didn't get really sick from eating hardened milk had a better chance of surviving the winter. In some of us, intestinal fauna are responsible for processing the lactose; a good 10 days of tetracycline can render such people lactose-intolerant. I think that's what happened to me.

Any chance of getting recolonized?

Not quickly. And last time I did the test, I still had problems. Not that I did a controlled study, you understand. The positive result is quite painful and sometimes humiliating.

It's not unreasonable. It's fond of salad. Vegetables are fine, especially brassicas. And it never met a citrus fruit it didn't like.

I think what you're doing now is called "listening to your body." A good practice also (stating an opinion, not issuing a directive), but not what I meant. The Inner Voice I was referring to is the same one that tells me "That person needs help. Go help." It's the voice that sings to me when the decorative pear trees are in bloom in the spring.

And tree-huggy stuff like that there.

What I'm saying is, for me, being vegetarian is a spiritual restriction, though not one that applies to anyone else. I am quite certain I could be significantly healthier if I started eating tuna.

Maybe your body voice is telling you it's deficient in iodine (I'm lethally allergic myself). Can't think why else you'd crave shellfish like that. Or maybe it's your tongue speaking (only backwards--oh, you know what I mean), and you just really like the flavor of oysters. Pleasure is good too.

Recipe? Most people who set foot in my house aren't allowed to leave again without taking a jar of marmalade with them.

To which Erik replied:

And, if you don't step foot in the place, you'll get a jar of limequat/kumquat marmalade hauled to you in, of all places, Racine, WI.

Golly she only had to bring ours to Manhattan. Meyer Lemon. Yum.

MKK

I guess people feel healthier eating so much meat, so they don't care that they also consume 100 times the natural resources that vegetarians consume for their food production. We're in a drought here (Southeast Pennsylvania), and they tell us to fix a leaky faucet, which may save 2700 gallons of water a year. They don't tell us that having ONE vegetarian meal instead of a steak will also save 2700 gallons of water, although the numbers can be found and computed quite easily. Just one steak dinner can waste almost three thousand gallons of water, compared to a vegetarian meal which likely cost about a hundred. Over a year a person can save about 400,000 gallons of water by eliminating meat from their diet. (Of course the actual number is highly variable, and for most people in more developed countries the number would fall between 100,000 and 1,000,000 gallons.)

The numbers are so staggering, not only the difference in resource use by meat eaters compared to vegetarians, but also the huge percent of people who don't care at all. Do you care?

p.s. I eat very well as a vegetarian. I've had my protein levels checked during regualr health emams, and found that I consume more than I need, and more than the "average American," although I do not make any effort to take in more or less protein, carbs, or fat (although I avoid diet products including lowfat dairy products, and I don't eat eggs).

p.p.s. While I originally gave up meat out of a feeling of responsility for natural resource conservation, now I keep this diet because of a growing love of Krishna. I sometimes pray to Him, "If somehow I should fall from Your favor because of my bad habits or foolish desires, please do not allow me to develop a desire or a taste for meat." After eating good vegetarian food for 10 years, meat seems really nasty. I can hardly believe I ate such filth for my first twentysomething years. I must've been brainwashed as a child into thinking animal slaughter was ok.

But the "ethical" vegetarian position is one I have trouble with, from a logical point of view.

Humans are predators, and so must kill to eat. Why should plants have less right to live than animals, I ask?

Redwoods and cattle: in a conflict, save the tree and kill the cow. IMHO.

To live without killing (oneself or by proxy, the former being somewhat more honest) one must learn photosynthesis. And people call themselves "green," but ain't no chlorophyll in them thar cells.

But this is really a religious difference, and I don't mean to start a quarrel. You believe that all animal life is sacred, and must not be taken to feed you; I have no quarrel with that. I, on the other hand, believe that all life is sacred, and that it is impossible to live without taking it; therefore the taking must be done with respect and honor to the killed being, whether plant, animal or fungus.

Paul, I don't know what you did in your past life that requires so much expiation in this one, but it must have been really awful. Care to speculate about it?

For various reasons, I'm sticking to organic, free-range or sustainably-farmed meat. For one thing, I don't need the hormones and antibiotics that are given to "conventionally raised" animals. Also, one of my rationales for not eating meat for so many years was disapproval of the meat industry and its practices. These days, I figure that I might as well support those who raise animals humanely and sustainably, in addition to boycotting those who don't.

The real argument is that it is true that we have no right to take any life from another creature. Life consumes life, but we are accountable. Human life means we can find a solution to this predicament, which gives us a way out of this predicament but also makes us responsible. Animals are not capable of our degree of understanding, and because they are unable to control their senses with intelligence, they must eat according to their bodily design.

The solution for humans is to dovetail their eating (and in fact all activities) with devotional service to God. In Bhagavad-gita (3.13) Krishna says, "The devotees of the Lord are released from all kinds of sins because they eat food which is offered first for sacrifice. Others, who prepare food for personal sense enjoyment, verily eat only sin," and in 9.26, He says, "If anyone offers Me with love and devotion a leaf, a flower, fruit, or some water, I will accept it." Elsewhere His appreciation for dairy products is described. So a person wishing to eat without incurring any sinful reactions prepares a vegetarian meal for Krishna, carefully made for His pleasure, and asks Him to accept it. After offering prayers, the devotee distributes the meal and then takes some for him- or herself. This process is completely spotless and transcendental, and no sin is incurred. Someone who eats only to gratify their own senses eats only sin, which is bound to the suffering of so many creatures in the path food takes on its way from the farm to someone's gut.

An added bonus is that foods prepared for and offered to Krishna taste much better than those prepared for one's own sense gratification.

-Paul

Anyway, cow protection on behalf of Krishna is devotional service, bhakti-yoga. Devotional service to the Personality of Godhead is on the platform of perfection, and may be done in the beginning as a form of penance, but ultimnately there is nothing more joyful than serving the Lord. And what could be a more natural loving exchange than offering Him a nice vegetarian meal?

(Incendentally, His eating is much like a Christian priest blessing bread and wine. Krishna eats the food by His glance [absolute means full potency in every part, i.e. He can eat with His vision or any other organ of action] and replaces the food with identical food made of His own self, which tastes great.)

- Paul