Healthy Diet at Home

I stopped by The Lighter Side of Low Carb’s Facebook fan page the other day, and noticed that Cleo had posted a picture showing what her personal USDA plate looks like. She had 3 strips of bacon, an egg, and 3 peas smiling up from the plate. While most of the comments shared how they would personally alter the foods in the graphic (I would have added another egg and more peas, myself), the one comment that caught my attention said - “Peas are evil.” There seems to be a common tendency within the low carb community to demonize foods not listed on the Atkins 2002 Induction menu chart. But I don’t know how or when that ever got started. I took a quick trip back to 1970 (one of the two Atkins’ books that survived the flea bombs that destroyed almost everything I owned last year), but Dr. Atkins’ advice didn't even insinuate that peas are evil. He said: “…additions are interchangeable and flexible. You can make any of these additions any week that you choose. I could be very arbitrary ...

(This is part 7 of a multi-part series on How to Tweak a Low Carb Diet . It explains the path I have traveled in my weight loss journey so far. If you didn’t read part 1, you can do so by clicking on the how-to link. Part 1 also includes links to the rest of the series.) My diet break obviously refilled my glycogen stores, since I was eating more carbohydrates, but that wasn’t a surprise. I was okay with the eight-pound weight regain because everything happened exactly as Lyle McDonald said it would. Although each of us have the potential to hold different amounts of glycogen in our liver and muscles, there was no reason to believe those eight pounds were fat. I was used to inputting everything I ate into Fitday, and that didn’t stop during my break, so it was easy to keep tabs on my daily calorie count. That helped to keep me zeroed into maintenance. Overall, my complete diet break went well, except that I took my husband’s suggestion and enjoyed a full month off from dieting that Dec...