My dad and I in the kitchen:
Dad: You’re on a diet?
Me: I’m eating low carb.
Dad: What’s a carb?
Me: Short for carbohydrate, all sugars and starches are carbohydrates.
Dad: I tend to eat what you eat. What’s it mean?
Me: See the pepperoni in the fridge?
Dad: Yeah.
Me: Go nuts on it. I’ve got tons of it. See the cheese in the fridge?
Dad: Yeah.
Me: Go nuts on it. Also, I’m going to be preparing a lot of broccoli.
Dad: I can deal with this.
Month: July 2012
Bad Balsamic
Low carb dieting has lead towards food choices that alternate between “oooh, that looks healthy” and “why are you doing that to yourself?” My lunches have been a salad topped with chicken and hardboiled egg topped with bleu cheese dressing. That last part is responsible for 40% of the calories in the salad so I figure I’d swap it out for balsamic vinegar and give myself a margin to down extra pepperoni later in the day. I ate my lunch gingerly, knowing that I had reduced my consumption that day by 15%. This energy faded when I logged my lunch in my calorie tracker and found that the two tablespoons of balsamic vinegar had contributed 6.8g of net carbohydrates against my daily allotment of 20g. How could ascetic acid with a few flavoring agents possibly be so high in carbohydrates? Because balsamic vinegar isn’t a traditional vinegar. It’s a grape reduction that turns out to be quite sweet that is then soured to give it the vinegar-y taste.
I had gotten quite good at rotating jars to check their carb content but now found a new Brutus waiting to slay me.
Fishy Headshots
Although I had been gone for two weeks, everyone at work had stories to tell me as if we’d not seen each other for a decade. One fellow told me of his adventures spearfishing and how messy it was. I asked if you could just aim for the brain and be done with it quickly and was told “Terry, the brain of a fish is the size of a pea. If you miss a little, you’ll hit it in the eye which is a hard place to pull a steel dart from. In spearfishing, there are no head shots”.
I worked late and went straight from work to Ockanickon without a chance to change. I was wearing a purple shirt that I thought made me look like a blueberry but everyone seemed to think it was a bold fashion move. One staff member looked at me and said “pooh, my name’s Terry and I’m from Dubai.” Good to know I have a shirt should I need to blend in with a gaggle of Emeratis.
A Return of Sorts
While traveling, I received a request to return temporarily to the firm that had fired me to take care of some testing needs that had popped up. Rather than my standard rate, I would be returning at my contractor rate which is 50% higher so I was glad to be back. Even thought I was gone for two weeks a few things were different:
- 85 people had been laid off since I was last there, the hallways were a little less crowded. This trickled into other things like shorter cafeteria lines and a closer parking spot.
- The new blank space in the refrigerator allowed me to bring in a 2-liter iced tea container. Something I should have tried to do at least five years ago.
- The candy dishes were brimming and someone had even brought in a cake. Now that I was a contractor, part of me wanted to bake a cake to bring in and then bill for “off site work”.
Charging Home
5am is normally a time where I can sleep quite well, but for some reason, rest wasn’t coming. Today I was driving home but, if I left now and drove swiftly, I’d be able to make a family get together just in time to politely decline the potato salad. I said goodbyes to the rest of my confused parties and launched Eastward making very good time for the first 500 miles. Then I-80 clogged up, then US-220 clogged up, then I-476 clogged up and I lost a total of four hours to traffic. Reunion missed, I parked in my driveway at 8pm on a day where I had driven back from Chicago, six hours before I’d normally return.
I broke the news to my housemates that I was going to be eating low carb:
Dave: So, what’s that mean for us?
Me: I have some popcorn to get rid of.
Dave: Smartfood, I love that stuff!
Me too, Dave. Me too.
No Photo Chicago
This trip to Chicago was the first for which I took no pictures. I even have pictures from what amounted to long lunch visits there yet this time my visit was for a full day and a half with no pictures. There are two things I missed:
- Suzie had a low carb ice cream mostly consisting of heavy cream which Peter’s young cat found very compelling. The cat became less and less hesitant to investigate until it decided to poke its head in while Suzie was eating resulting in a cat vs. person stare-down.
- The sun setting over South Chicago while Audrey, Peter, Suzie, and I had our first homemade dinner at Peter’s residence.
Keto Donut
I tried to make a keto-friendly angel food cake today, figuring that I could substitute the white flour and sugar with almond flour and Splenda, respectively. Â The recipe called for the relatively low-carb cocoa powder and I set to getting the foam to rise. Â Using just my arm, that took quite a bit of time and my forearms were screaming after a few minutes. Â I worked the foam to soft peaks, a bit below what I should have and folded in the appropriate ingredients. Â I popped the pan in the oven and 35 minutes later was met with a eggy, chocolatey, failed keto donut.
The result had the density of an omelet and the fluffiness of a devil’s food cake.  The bottom was a gelatinous cloud of sweet eggs and after learning that Splenda wasn’t zero carb, I learned it had eight grams of net carbs per slice, 40% of your daily allowance.
My host loved it.
Ketosis Notes, Part 1
I was happy that I had access to a treadmill and about three miles into a run I had a funny taste in my mouth like I was sucking on a penny. My urine smelled like dinosaur sweat and my body odor had changed character. I had entered ketosis and had the discolored ketosis reagent test strip to prove it. The test strips were nice as a way of saying “yes, you’re doing this correctly” and I’m glad we had gotten them.
So what does ketosis feel like? These were my initial impressions:
- The first day I tried it, I felt a distinct weakness for about an hour. This was my blood sugar passing below some level but I didn’t experience that weakness again.
- My water consumption more than doubled as my kidneys needed a lot of help to flush out ketones.
- My urine seemed to have a fine film to it link of like the sheen of a puddle with a drop of oil in it.
- My weight hadn’t changed. Nor did I expect it to considering this was only day three of the diet.
Brotherhood of the Traveling Shirts
A year or so ago, I gave a friend my stash of XXXL blue oxford shirts. I visited him tonight and he was wearing one. They aged well and look good on him. I hope they never look good on me again. Midway through the conversation, I started talking about success with a ketogenic diet and he seemed interesting. We talked about food substitutions and how to get nutrients as well as some pitfalls like me learning how sugary cocktail sauce is. We talked about what it’s like to be a large person and he railed at people who are annoyed when sharing public transit with him. He made the observation that “when I sit next to someone, we’re both crowded” and I don’t think most people recognize this reciprocity. It seems neither wholly wrong nor wholly right to blame the larger party but there’s no convenient way to communicate that middle ground.
I hope he gives low carb a try and that it works. If so, the baby blue oxfords that served me so well and then him will pass on again and maybe serve someone else. I picture wrapping them up with a few typed pages on keto and they making their way across the country making large men look a little bit nicer on their way to becoming thinner people.
Ersatz Potatoes
When traveling, I set up a command base, here it was in a kitchen and I had the benefit of sun-drenched mornings as I scanned for work. My search pattern had expanded to include New York City and DC and I found a few new options there. I also added internships to my search and spent the day tweaking my resume and trying to look not-quite-too-good-to-be-true.
Dinner that evening had keto “mashed potatoes” which consists of mashed cauliflower and cream cheese. It wasn’t quite there but I could see how the two were related.
The evening snack was guacamole served with bits of bacon on top. I had used spinach as the base but found that strips of bacon done crispier than I prefer served as perfectly reasonable chip substitutes. Bacon instead of potato chips. This I could endure.