Category: Diet

Tired of home taps that only deliver water? How would you like a beer tap hooked up to your kitchen sink? One Norwegian woman recently discovered her tap water had turned into beer.

It wasn’t a miracle, though; it was just a plumbing malfunction.

"It almost seemed like a miracle to Haldis Gundersen when she turned on her kitchen faucet this weekend and found the water had turned into beer.

"Two flights down, employees and customers at the Big Tower Bar were horrified when water poured out of the beer taps.

"By an improbable feat of clumsy plumbing, someone at the bar in Kristiandsund, western Norway, had accidentally hooked the beer hoses to the water pipes for Gundersen’s apartment.

[…]

"However, Gundersen said the beer was flat and not tempting, even in a country where a half-liter (pint) can cost about 25 kroner ($3.75) in grocery stores."

GET THE STORY.

I’m not much of an alcohol drinker myself. I wonder if I could get my taps to spout soda….

Guess what the heart in the image pictured here was created from.

Did you say Necco candy hearts? Then you were right.

SEE MORE PICTURES.

(Nod to CandyAddict.com for the link. Be sure to check out CA’s post for related links.)

Feel free to caption the photo in the combox.

A reader writes:

You made some blog posts in July of last year in regards to fiber and wieght loss.  The scientific approach that you used for losing weight was very appealing to me (I’m a software engineer).

Basically I set a goal of losing 2 lbs a week  (with some weeks being exceptions like Thanksgiving and Christmas).  I then weighed myself twice a day to determine how I was tracking to that goal each week and adjusting my food intake accordingly. 

I get most of my exercise playing indoor soccer 3 times a week and chasing my 4 kids (I will really be in for it once my twin 11 month old boys figure out walking). 

I did supplement fiber via powder mixed in water for the first few months of dieting pretty consistently, but less so after that.  Long story short, I was 210 last July and am 155 now (at 5 ft. 7in) and I credit you with inspiring me to strategize losing weight. 

It will be nice when I get back into backpacking this year to have a lighter load to carry.  So thanks Jimmy for sharing your knowledge and perspectives through your website,

Congratulations! I’m honored to have played a role in your achieving your goals. I hope your remarks come as an encouragement to others.

I’m also glad that the fiber recommendation was useful. It really can play a significant role in helping folks achieve their weight goals.

READ MORE.

Michelle here.

Confession time: I am not a fan of the rosary.

Well, let me be a bit more clear: I appreciate the wonderful history and heritage attached to the rosary; I was impressed and grateful when John Paul II gave Catholics the luminous mysteries of the rosary (I even wrote an article with a sidebar on that event); I admire those who are have a devotion to the rosary. But I don’t. It’s always been a difficult prayer for me to pray. When I use my rosary beads, I usually use them to say the Divine Mercy chaplet, a prayer devotion that I personally prefer.

So, you can imagine my horror when a friend suggested that I pray a 54-day novena, a novena that entails saying five decades of the rosary for 54 days in a row! This friend is a spiritual mentor, so I didn’t reject her suggestion out of hand. I thought about it.

Then I said no.

My friend, like a good spiritual mentor should be, was perfectly fine with that. Then she had a brainstorm. She knew of a particular intention for which I had been praying for years. She suggested that I offer up some of the trials I had experienced over this past year for that particular intention to be fulfilled. Sounded like a great idea. She never even mentioned the 54-day novena.

It did occur to me though that a 54-day novena would be a significant and, for me, sacrificial, means by which I could offer up those trials for that intention. I sighed and told both my friend and the Blessed Mother that they had won. I’d do the 54-day novena.

I’ve been doing it for the few weeks and have about twenty days left. The reason I tell this story to you is because of a side benefit that praying this novena has had for me.

At first I prayed the novena while sitting on my couch in typical couch-potato style. Then I had a brainstorm.

I had been wanting to establish a walking routine for some time now, but for various reasons this had proven a fruitless effort. Then I realized that the rosary usually takes me about twenty minutes to pray. If I walked while I prayed the rosary, I would be walking twenty minutes per day. Not exactly an Iron Woman regimen, but it would be a good place for me to start.

You might think that a Couch Potato like me would have difficulty doing the whole rosary before needing a break. The first night I only got through three decades before needing to sit down, but after that I could do all five. And so, for twenty minutes per night I’ve been pacing my living-room floor praying the rosary in this 54-day novena.

At this rate, and assuming I maintain my Rosary A Day after the novena is finished, I expect to reach China sometime in the next century.

NOTE: Any and all prayers you want to add to mine for my special intention would be greatly appreciated.

PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is on the warpath again, this time charging that a bust of Colonel Harlan Sanders, founder of the fast-food chicken franchise KFC, is "a monument to cruelty" — to chickens, that is.

"Pamela Anderson is leading a charge to remove a bust of KFC founder Colonel Harland Sanders from the state Capitol.

"The actress called the Kentucky native’s likeness ‘a monument to cruelty’ to chickens in a statement issued by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the animal rights group.

[…]

KFC spokeswoman Laurie Schalow called the move to oust the colonel ‘just another misguided publicity stunt by PETA in their attempt to create a vegan society.’"

GET THE STORY.

Star-for-a-day celebrities such as Ms. Anderson may keep the publicity mill churning by making ridiculous statements about "cruelty to chickens" for a thirty-second soundbyte on Entertainment Tonight, but when it comes to real injustice — such as one million unborn children slaughtered in the U.S. every year — they are either conspicuously silent or conspicuously marching as Celebrity Guests at rallies to promote the injustice.

Which leads me to believe that it is not the cause de jour that matters so much as the public image and the publicity.

A reader writes:

My husband is gluten intolerant do you know if the yam flour in the shirataki is gluten free? I also did the low carb and lost 100 lbs. but now putting it back on and have to get it off health reasons. so new year new life again. Please let me know if you know about this thank you. Have a wonderful New Year and every day.

I did some checking and there are a bunch of sites on the Net that indicate that shirataki is gluen free.

This would make sense. A dictionary I checked defined gluten as "A mixture of plant proteins occurring in cereal grains, chiefly corn and wheat, used as an adhesive and as a flour substitute." Since the kind of yam from which shirataki is made isn’t a grain, it shouldn’t have gluten.

Just to be sure, though, I’d probably have your husband test a small bit (assuming that’s safe for him) to see if there’s any reaction.

It hadn’t occurred to me before, but folks who are gluten-intolerant (celiac) must sometimes have a difficult time finding noodles that are safe. I assume rice noodles would be okay, but not if you’re trying to do low-carb.

MORE INFO ON THE PLANT FROM WHICH SHIRATAKI IS MADE.

Note that this article refers to the "corm"–C-O-R-M–from which shirataki is made. A corm is a large underground root (hence: "yam"), not to be confused with "corn" (C-O-R-N), which means a grain. (Here in America we call "Indian corn" (i.e., maize) "corn," but in England the word is used for other grains, like wheat.)

INFO ON THE LOW-CARB ASPECT OF SHIRATAKI.

MORE ON THAT.

BTW, I really like the little, shrimp-sized bundles of shirataki noodles (like the bundle pictured above). They’re called musubi-shirataki in case you want to try them.

A reader writes:

I was on you site and hope you can help me. I need to lose 40 lbs. I am a women 5’7 and weigh 190. My age is 50 . I would like to go on the Atkins diet but for me it is hard to sit down and write a meal plan for every day can you please help me?

Buy the book.

Do not say buy the book. I have a busy life style with foster children and not much time for myself.

Oh, okay.

The good news is that if you want to do the Atkins diet you won’t have to write out a meal plan for every day. You only have to keep certain principles in mind:

1. Eating carbohydrates causes your body to manufacture insulin, which prevents you from burning fat. If you eliminate carbohydrates then your body will be able to burn fat better.
2. Your body has three sources of fuel it can burn: carbohydrates, fat, and protein. If you get rid of the carbs then your body will have no choice but to burn fat and protein.
3. Atkins recommends that you eat no more than 20 grams of digestible carbohydrates per day for your first two weeks on the diet (the Protein Power Diet recommends 30 grams instead if you feel 20 is too restrictive). This will virtually guarantee that you go into fat burning mode.
4. After the first two weeks, you can increase the number of digestible carbs you eat per day to a higher level (perhaps 40-60 carbs per day) as long as you don’t stop losing weight. If you do stop losing weight (over a period of a few weeks) then reduce the number of carbs till you start losing again.
5. After you’ve lost the weight you want to lose, you can increase your daily carbs again, so long as you don’t start gaining weight. If you start gaining weight, reduce your carbs till you get back to where you need to be weight-wise.
6. If you go off the diet completely then you are likely to gain back all your weight. This happens when you go off any diet, so don’t view the diet as a temporary thing but as a long-term change in how you eat.
7. To figure out the digestible carbs you are eating, look at the number of carbs listed on the product label and subtract those that are due to fiber (which you can’t digest) or which are listed as "sugar alcohols" (technically, you can digest these, but they don’t spike your insulin up). For example: If the package says that a serving has 11 grams of carbs, 4 of which are fiber and 2 of which are sugar alcohols then the total digestible carbs in a serving are 5 grams (11 – 4 – 2 = 5). It’s the total digestible carbs (not total carbs) that you want to keep low. DEGESTIBLE CARBS ARE ALSO SOMETIMES CALLED "NET" CARBS ON PRODUCT LABELS.
8. The fact that you are counting carbs means that you are NOT counting calories. Eat whenever you are hungry and eat as much as you need to satisfy your hunger (NOT MORE). Just keep the carb count low. You are counting carbs, not calories. This makes the diet much easier than calorie-restriction diets since you can eat whenever you are hungry and thus avoid hunger pains.
9. The upshot of lowering carbs in this way means that you need to avoid things made from sugar or grain (wheat, rice, corn) or anything starchy (potatoes).
10. You can eat beef, pork, chicken, fish, eggs, butter, oils, and cheese, though, since these have virtually NO carbs. (Eating meats–which have protein–is better than lots of butter, oils, and cheese, though, since meats will give your body protein to burn so that your body only burns fat rather than the protein stored in your muscles.)
11. Eating green vegetables is generally good (but not corn, which is a grain, or potatoes, which are starchy).
12. Eating fiber is good. I recommend drinking a powdered fiber supplement  mixed with water (not a pill)–such as the ones make by Yerba Prima. This will fill you up without adding calories (you can’t digest fiber). DO NOT drink fiber supplements mixed with sugar since the sugar will spike your insulin and hinder your weight loss. If you can get 25 or more grams of fiber a day it will make your weight loss easier, but build up to this level slowly or you may feel bloated while your body gets used to the new level of fiber.
13. Take a good multi-vitamin EVERY DAY to make sure you’re getting enough vitamins. If possible, take a multi-vitamin designed for people on low-carb diets.
14. Get some exercise. Just twenty minutes of brisk walking three times a week will really jump up your metabolism and make you burn fat better. (Take the kids walking with you if you need to; it’ll help THEM get exercise they need, too!) Do in-home walking if you want. I recommend Leslie Sansone’s in-home walking DVDs to help keep you happy and motivated. She’s so friendly and supportive of you ask you walk away the pounds. She’ll make you feel good about exercise and not bored by it.
15. Learn about low-carb substitutes for foods you like. There are TONS of these now. There are good low-carb breads, tortillas, pastas, pizzas, chips, cereals, meal bars, diet shakes, ice creams, candies & candy bars. Just make sure you don’t go crazy with them and eat more digestible carbs than you should. Keep that daily carb-count low. These same low-carb products can be ordred online (do a Google search for them) if they aren’t in your local grocery, nutritional, or health-food stores.
16. You may have carb cravings for a few days but these generally go away
    in two weeks, and you can eat low-carb foods like the ones mentioned in
    point #15 to stop them.
17. You may feel tired the first few days on the diet. This is normal, but your energy will snap back in a few days and you’ll feel GREAT–like you have more energy than you’ve had in years.
18. Once you have settled into a routine, you likely won’t need to count carbs any more. You’ll know instinctively from what you’re eating that you are below your weight-loss threshhold. And you WON’T need to do a daily meal plan or deprive yourself if you start feeling hungy.
19. Your weight can go up and down a good bit over the course of a day or a few days. Therefore, don’t get discouraged if you see it fluctuating in this fashion. To avoid this, some dieters recommend weighing yourself only once a week so you’ll see less of the fluctuation. What counts is that you are losing weight over the course of several weeks, not that you seem to be losing it every time you step on the scale.
20. To the extent you can, spread out your consumption of digestible carbs throught the day. This will minimize your insulin reaction to the food you’re eating. Don’t eat one big, high-carb meal if you can avoid it.
21. For low-carb milk buy the low-carb milk in your grocer’s freezer or use (and, if needed, dilute with water) heavy cream or whipping cream or half-and-half. Sour cream is also low-carb.
22. For low-carb crunch eat celery, pork rinds (chicharrones), nuts (without honey-roasting! always watch the digestible carbs on the label!–macadamias are the best, though peanuts and almonds are good), or small amounts of raw carrots or popcorn–or specially-designed low-carb chips.

Also, few other notes:

1. If you have a major health problem, check with your doctor before starting the diet (or any diet).
2. To smooth your transition into the diet, take 2-3 days to adjust to the low levels of carbs you’ll be eating at first.  Decrease your carbs over these 2-3 days until you’re at the 20 (or 30) grams of digestible carbs per day that the diets recommend.
3. Consider taking nutritional supplements that will help you lose weight–like chromium picolinate and L-carnitine. Here’s a good book on the subject.
4. Poke around my diet section for additional suggestions (like drinking flax seed oil, cranberry juice, and lemon juice–or how to make low-carb mashed potatoes or low-carb hash browns). These may be a help.
5. Buy the book. It really will help. Just treat it as a source of ideas rather than something you have to read from cover-to-cover.
6. Get a low-carb cookbook or two. The recipe ideas will help keep the diet from getting old and will help you discover low-carb equivalents for your favorite foods. The standard low-carb diet books (like the Atkins book) also include recipe sections to give you ideas. Many low-carb recipes are also available online for free. Just Google "low-carb recipes."
7. When you have time (amidst your busy schedule), check out some similar low-carb diets, like the Protein Power Diet, the South Beach Diet, and the Fat-Flush Diet. They can give you good tips and recipe ideas, too.

Finally, BE CONFIDENT! You CAN do this!–and without feeling hungry.

I spent YEARS trying to lose weight before my doctor told me about the Atkins Diet, but when I discovered it, it changed my life. I lost a HUGE amount of weight on it, I’ve KEPT THE WEIGHT OFF (despite some slips and plateaus), and I’m fitter and feeling better than I did for YEARS.

You can feel that way, TOO! Go forth and CONQUER!

A reader writes:

I’m Canadian, but I did spend 6 years living in Los Angeles, CA and I do have an American girlfriend so this year I decided to celebrate American Thanksgiving.  The Canadian version is actually in October on what you guys celebrate as Columbus Day.

So for my US Thanksgiving feast I decided to finally make a turducken.  In case you haven’t heard of it, a turducken is what you get when you stuff a chicken into a duck and then into a turkey.  Of course that’s the short version of the preperatory phase.  I took some pictures of the process and a friend of mine was kind enough to post them on his websit.  The last photo is a cross section with labelling.  The stuff between the birds is sausage stuffing and cornbread stuffing.

This particular bird took 10 hours to cook at 225F until the internal temp reached the target of 165F.  I invited 14 friends over to help us feast and we still had half the bird left.  Anyway, though you might find the pictures interesting.

Y’know, I’ve read about turducken, but I’ve never known anyone to actually make it. Amazing.

It’s a good thing turkeys are native to the New World or there’s probably have been a prohibition on this kind of thing in the Mosaic Law.

GET THE PICTURES. (WARNING! Pictures of cooked and uncooked food!)

I had heard that some people who suffer severe allergies to certain food can suffer reactions because of proximity to, rather than ingestion of, the food in question. For example, I once heard of a child allergic to peanuts who went into anaphylactic shock upon stepping into his classroom, where it turned out that there was a Snickers wrapper in the wastebasket. I believe that child survived. A young woman allergic to peanuts, who went into anaphylactic shock after kissing her boyfriend who had just eaten peanuts, tragically did not survive.

"A 15-year-old girl with a peanut allergy died after kissing her boyfriend, who had just eaten a peanut butter snack, hospital officials said Monday.

"Christina Desforges died in a Quebec hospital Wednesday after doctors were unable to treat her allergic reaction to the kiss the previous weekend.

"Desforges, who lived in Saguenay, about 155 miles north of Quebec City, was almost immediately given a shot of adrenaline, a standard tool for treating the anaphylactic shock brought on by a peanut allergy, officials said."

GET THE STORY.

What a terrible story, but it does shed light for parents on the necessity to determine just how severe food allergies are and exactly what kind of proximity to the food can trigger an attack. It can also show that one person’s food allergy may require an adjustment in eating habits not just for that person but for family and friends.

This is another "wish I’d thought of this sooner" post. If it comes too late for you to use this Thanksgiving, consider it for Christmas.

For hard-core low-carb folks who will keep the discipline even on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas (which is to say, people like me), here’s a way to approximate traditional holiday cuisine a little bit.

Some things like turkey and ham are, of course, no problem as long people don’t mess them up with carb-laden additives.

But how is it possible to get a low-carb equivalent of that holiday favorite, mashed potatoes?

Actually, there’s more than one way. I’ve seen mixes for low-carb equivalents to mashed potatoes, but there’s a very simple way to do it that just uses what you can get in an ordinary grocery store.

Here’s the secret: Make mashed cauliflower instead.

Like potatoes, cauliflower brought to the right temperature gets nice and mushy, so you can then mush them up. It’s also simliar in color to potatoes but–unlike the latter food–it is quite low carb. A 3 oz. serving of it has like 2 grams of digestible carbs and 2 grams of fiber and only 20 calories.

So just get some cauliflower–frozen or fresh–and nuke it until it’s really soft (I just tested a package of fresh cauliflower florettes in a bag and after 7 minutes on high it was quite mushy)–the mush it up with a spoon and you’re ready to go.

Since cauliflower–like potatoes–has a relatively neutral taste (not the same as potatoes, but still pretty bland) it’s really just a flavor vehicle for what you put on it.

So what can you put on it?

Exact same stuff you put on mashed potatoes: milk, butter, gravy, mushrooms, chives, cheese, salt, pepper–none of those are problems from a low-carb perspective (as long as you use low-carb milk or half-and-half or heavy cream and as long as the gravy isn’t loaded with carbs; many commercial gravies aren’t bad carb-wise at all), so have at it!

When I was a boy my mom would do fancy things with mashed potatoes on holidays, like form them into individual, ball-like servings (with a point on top) and brown them in the oven before serving. I haven’t verified that that would work with mashed cauliflower, but I imagine it would, so if your family’s into that kind of thing, you might try it, too.

Good luck with your holiday low-carbing!