Epstein fury and some backsliding.

Damn that guy taking up space in the White House anyway. I was all set to write a mea culpa blog post about how working this session screwed up my low-carb eating plan, and then I woke up yesterday morning, as we all did, to the news that Trump's latest gambit to draw headlines away from the Epstein files is to team up with Bibi Netanyahu to bomb Iran -- which country's nuclear capability we supposedly obliterated in June of last year, or so said Trump at the time.

The warmongers in Washington named the attack Operation Epic Fury, but it took no time at all for the memesters to change it to Operation Epstein Fury.

Already some US service members have lost their lives in retaliatory bombing, and Trump has said more are likely to die. Isn't this the same guy who said that if he was re-elected, he wasn't going to start any wars? His supporters believed him. And now, here we are.

I am so tired of this timeline.

***

Anyway, I'm not going to let him derail my plans for this post. My original topic is not good news, either, but I'll put in a little palate cleanser at the end. 

***

So yeah, the last week or two of this year's legislative session was hard. I whined about how hard it was here a couple of weeks back. What I didn't mention in that post was how the stress and anxiety, coupled with freely available, carb-heavy food, pinged my bad eating habits of yesteryear. I'd been amping up the snacking anyway, but this session put me back where I was toward the end of my time in DC.

Well, not completely back to those days. This year, I wasn't leaving work in the middle of the afternoon to head over to some shop to stock up on candy and a bag of chips, then polish off all of it at my desk before quitting time. But it was bad.

This past Monday, I had my regular appointment with my endocrinologist. Before session, my A1c was 6.5; on Monday, it was 8.9. Optimal for diabetics is less than 7.0. So yeah -- not good.

She told me to go back to a strict low-carb diet -- protein and veggies only. She outfitted me with a continuous glucose monitor that doesn't require a prescription and had me download an app that would let her see how I was doing. And then she asked me if I wanted to try Ozempic. I sighed and said okay.

Not my pen. This is a stock photo.
Artmim | Deposit Photos

I sighed because it felt like going backwards. When I left DC, I was not only taking Ozempic, I was also on a drug called Invokana that basically filters out all the extra sugar in your blood and sends it out through your kidneys. Neither one was too pricey when I was on the law firm's Cadillac insurance plan, but once I retired, hoo boy. It was those eye-watering prescription prices that made me try low-carbing in the first place. And low carbing worked -- until it didn't.

But it worked far longer than it might otherwise have. A fairly recent study found that most people regain the weight they lost, as well as losing all the other benefits they gained from being on a GLP-1, within two years of stopping the drug. I didn't lose weight when I was on Ozempic before because I was binge eating. But it took me five years to lose the benefits of taking it.

One thing it did help with, I believe, was quieting the food noise in my head. After I moved out here, I remember telling someone that I didn't have a craving for sweets anymore. Now I think that was because of the Ozempic. If it quiets the food noise again, it would be worth the eye-watering prescription price, at least until I can get back on the low-carb track.

I do like the continuous monitor. It's kind of fun, watching the numbers go up and down. I will likely feel different if I backslide again and the graph starts going the wrong way. But I'm pretty sure my numbers will be much better when I see my doctor next. I'll keep y'all posted.

***

Okay, here's the palate cleanser. We've had really nice weather here, with highs in the upper 60s. Tigs and I spent some time out on the porch this afternoon, and he alerted me when some birds showed up at the feeder. (I hope you guys can watch this -- I'm never sure about Apple's video format.) 

***

These desperate moments of blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.

A twofer: The low-carb food pyramid and that ICE video.

I've said it before: some weeks there's nothing to write about, and some weeks there's too much. Like this week. I was all set to opine on the new USDA food pyramid, but then Renee Good was murdered by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. So I'm going to do both -- the food pyramid first, and then the other thing.

***

Screenshot from the USDA website

Never in a million years did I think I would ever agree with the guy with the dead brain worm who's running the US Department of Health and Human Services, under which the US Department of Agriculture sits. But weird shit keeps happening in 2026. So here we are.

I think the new food pyramid is actually okay.

In the 14-plus years I've been blogging (it'll be 15 this August), I've written about weight loss, uh, a whole bunch of times. (There's a search box over on the right; plug in "diet" if you want to find them all.) Most recently, I started eating low carb to get my blood glucose numbers under control. It worked great -- until I went back to work full-time. It became much harder to keep to a low-carb diet, making everything from scratch, when I resumed sitting on my butt for nine hours a day. I still have the treadmill I wrote about a few years back, but (full disclosure) it's currently gathering dust. So I've gained back weight that I lost right after I retired and went low-carb.

But I still believe in low-carb eating: protein at every meal, fruits and veggies but not the starchy ones, full-fat dairy, a limit on whole grains, and no sugar, refined carbs, or junk food. And that's what the new pyramid promotes. 

People are howling about The Fat, particularly that full-fat dairy is now okay. I get that it upends a few decades of nutritional guidance. But there has been scientific evidence over the past few years that the low-fat-dairy advice is mostly circumstantial. That is, nutritionists thought that since fat has more calories than, say, carbs, and that fat is what clogs people's arteries and gives them heart disease, then the answer was to eat less fat. But it turns out that simplistic assumption is wrong. High-fat dairy has been found to improve blood pressure in some studies.

And I believe, just as an anecdotal observation, that it was the advice of nutritionists to eat less fat and consume more carbs back in the '80s that have made obesity and type 2 diabetes become public health concerns.

It wouldn't be the first time that nutrition science has given us bum advice. Remember when eggs were deemed bad for us because of the cholesterol in them? Debunked. Remember when we were told to switch to margarine because of the fat in butter? Also debunked (it turns out the trans fats in margarine are worse than the regular fat in butter).

People are also howling about the advice that added sugar should be kept away from kids until they're eleven years old. Parents are saying it's impossible: "There's sugar in everything!" Well, yes, and it's because food manufacturers have been lacing their products with cheap additives like sugar and salt for decades to make them taste good, and nobody has made them stop. I recognize that it's hard for people who live in food deserts to get fresh fruits and veggies. But cheap food additives and food deserts are things we can fix. (Interestingly, Fox News host Laura Ingraham has admitted that Michelle Obama was right about food deserts. I guess if the advice is coming from a Republican, it's okay?)

Anyway, I find myself applauding the USDA's new food pyramid, and I hope my fellow folks on the left calm down enough to see the wisdom in it. (I can't believe I'm putting Bobby Brainworm and wisdom in the same sentence. This is a really weird year.)

***

Okay, on to the tougher thing to talk about: The murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis this week. Murder is a loaded word, but I believe it's justified in this case.

So many words have been written about this incident already that I'm not going to add much. But I wanted to address the video released by Vice President J.D. Vance this week that the shooter himself, Jonathan Gold, shot with his phone. I haven't watched any of the videos, nor do I intend to; I used to get paid to see tough stuff when I was a journalist, and nobody's paying me to do that anymore. But I read historian Heather Cox Richardson's description of the video on her Substack yesterday. 

I've seen some social media commenters questioning why Vance and other right-wing nutjobs thought the video would help their side. I know exactly why. It's because it shows that a woman -- not Renee, but her wife -- mouthed off to a white man in a position of authority, and she wouldn't stop. So he killed Renee.

That's it. That's their whole justification for the shooting. Woman mouths off and won't stop? Shoot her. Kill her. She deserves it.

Every abuser, ever, has used the same defense. 

I hate this timeline.

***

These moments of bloggy insanity have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. #AbolishICE.

Second childhoods.

mitchdhutchinson | Deposit Photos

It's a holiday weekend here in the US, and that means the media are publishing a lot of evergreen stories -- features that can run any time, and in fact may have been written a week or two before they show up on your favorite news outlet.

One of the themes this year appears to be keeping old folks entertained.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a feature by Rob LaZebnik, who's a co-producer and writer for "The Simpsons", about how he's trying to avoid being boring, now that he's past 60. His friends and co-workers had heard all of his best stories multiple times, so he decided to try a bunch of stuff so he'd have new stories to tell. Several of the activities on his list I've already done ("set up a table at an autograph convention" -- check; "made a shirt" -- check; "bid at an art auction" -- check; "cooked dinner" -- what kind of rarefied life does this guy lead that he's never cooked dinner before?), but others I have zero interest in. "Attend a megachurch", for example, is not, nor will it ever be, on a challenge list of mine. (The rest of his list included going to a leather gay bar, taking a sound bath, making an announcement on an airplane, and going on a police ride-along.)

I suppose the idea is to come up with your own challenge list. But if that sounds like too much work -- and let's face it, at the end of a four-day weekend, almost everything sounds like too much work -- then toymakers are coming to our rescue. They're aiming at the senior-citizen crowd by retconning classic games and developing new ones. New "Generations" versions of games like Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit have bigger game pieces and larger fonts (which makes me wonder if there are ADA standards for such things, but I digress). These versions are also supposed to allow grandparents to play games more easily with their grandkids; according to the Associated Press, "the answer to a question in Trivial Pursuit about fitness can be Jack LaLanne or Zumba, depending on the player’s age." 

Jack LaLanne? Just how old an audience are these people aiming at? I would have said Jane Fonda, or even Richard Simmons. Jack LaLanne, really??

The idea of old folks buying toys out of nostalgia isn't new (it's called a second childhood for a reason...), but toymakers noticed an uptick during the pandemic, when isolated older adults began "gravitating toward plush animals and robotic pets as companions." (This clearly does not include me, as Flora is neither plush nor robotic.)

These toymakers are all benevolence, of course, only wanting to help this aging demographic's quality of life: the games give elder folks a way to interact with their grandkids. And puzzles keep your mind sharp, right?

Eh, not so much. Reseachers have found that while playing a lot of puzzles makes older folks good at doing those specific puzzles, it doesn't do much of anything for the types of skills that would help them keep working longer, for example, or allow them to live independently. Skills like, say, cooking dinner.

As for interacting with the grandkids, it seems to me that the prospect of playing a board game with Gramps wouldn't be much of an enticement to the cellphone-and-video-game generation. The robotic pet, though -- that might be a better draw.

***

Oh, speaking of retcons, I should update you on the pumpkin pudding tweak that I mentioned last week. Substituting brown "sugar" Swerve for regular brown sugar worked great. 

However, we are not going to talk about the recipe for keto pecan pie I found online and how I tried to tweak that today with the ingredients I had on hand. Nope! Not discussing it!

***

These moments of bloggy amusement have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Gobble, gobble.

 

SlipFloat | Deposit Photos

We are currently in the midst of Peak Eating Season, which I define as the period that starts when you buy the first bag of Halloween candy and ends after the leftover Easter candy goes on sale. The season kicks into high gear in the U.S. this coming week with Thanksgiving on Thursday.

A lot of people stress over Thanksgiving, and not just because all the relatives are coming (including the ones you don't like). There's also a lot of angst over how to cook the turkey, how much food to buy, which sides to have, and so on. Not me! I am one of those people who makes the same thing every year. I buy the biggest turkey I can*, stuff it with Pepperidge Farm stuffing, roast it in one of those plastic cooking bags, and serve it with mashed potatoes from a box, nuked whole sweet potatoes, a green vegetable, crescent rolls from the vacuum-packed can (nothing says a holiday meal at La Casa Cantwell like the explodey sound those tubes of dough make), and the jellied substance that my daughters long ago dubbed "canberry sauce". With pumpkin pie and chocolate pudding pie for dessert.

That is, that was the menu for many, many years. Then I went low carb.

Honestly, though, as a veteran of decades of dieting, I can assure you that of all the holiday meals, Thanksgiving is one of the easiest to adapt to whatever lifestyle change you're making. Granted, it's tougher for vegetarians and vegans because of the focus on meat (a problem that Thanksgiving shares with Christmas dinner). But for nearly everybody else, a few tweaks and you're good.

Take this low-carb thing. There's quite a number of carbs in my old menu, but you can lean on lower carb veggies for sides.

Take the stuffing, for example. A couple of years ago, I found a recipe online for cauliflower "stuffing". It is amazing. It 100 percent tastes like regular stuffing. And it's not just me saying it - other people I've served it to have said the same thing. (Pro tip: If you have a Trader Joe's nearby, skip the business about chopping your own cauliflower, carrots, onion and celery -- instead, stop by their produce section and pick up a bag or two of fresh riced cauliflower and a container of mirepoix.)

For rolls, I've made almond flour biscuits. The mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes? You could sub mashed butternut squash, but honestly, I just skip them and add another veggie. This year, it'll be acorn squash. It's not like there isn't enough other food on the table.

Turkey is already zero carb, but I always feel like I ought to put something where the stuffing usually goes. I'm going to try this recipe this year, which includes my cherished plastic cooking bag but doesn't require you to stuff the bird with bread.

The canberry sauce is a tough one, but in the past, I've made cranberry-orange relish with Swerve instead of regular sugar.

For dessert this year, I'm going to tweak a pumpkin pudding recipe that I've used for many years. It worked great when I was doing the regular kind of dieting, and I think all I'll have to do to make it low carb is swap the brown sugar for brown "sugar" Swerve. I'll report back.

Here's the recipe. I don't remember which newspaper I got it from, or I'd give them credit.

***

1 14 oz. can pumpkin puree (don't get canned pumpkin pie filling by mistake)

1/2 c. light brown sugar (I'm going to sub brown "sugar" Swerve)

1/2 t. nutmeg

3/4 t. cinnamon

1/4 t. ginger

1/4 t. ground cloves

(Of course, you could use 1 3/4 t. of pumpkin pie spice (aka "pumpkin spice") instead of the individual spices)

1 c. whole milk (or 2% or nut milk -- but remember that the less fat in your milk, the less creamy the pudding will be)

3 eggs

Preheat oven to 425 degrees Farenheit. Bring a large teapot full of water to a boil. In a medium bowl, whisk together the pumpkin puree, brown sugar/"sugar", and spices. Set aside. In a small bowl, whisk together the milk and eggs, then add them to the pumpkin mixture and whisk until smooth. Arrange eight ramekins in a shallow baking dish (about 2" deep) or lasagna pan. Spoon or ladle the pumpkin mixture into the ramekins. Place the baking pan in the oven. With the oven door open, carefully pour the hot water into the baking pan until it reaches halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Push the baking pan to the center of the oven and bake for 20 minutes; reduce heat to 350 degrees and bake for another 30-35 minutes or until the pumpkin is set. Carefully remove the baking pan from the oven and remove the ramekins from the pan. Serve warm or cool.

***

* On the off chance that I haven't bored y'all with this before, here's why I always buy a huge turkey: It's cheap. This year, I paid 67 cents a pound for my turkey. And here's the key:

You don't have to eat the whole thing in one weekend. 

Once the big meal is over, I use a four container system for turkey leftovers: one for slices from the breast for sandwiches, one for the rest of the white meat, one for the dark meat, and one for the skin and the other stuff that nobody's gonna eat. The breast slices go in the fridge for eating that weekend, and the light and dark meat goes in the freezer. (The fourth container goes in the trash, or you can boil the contents for broth.) I can stretch those frozen leftovers for months: turkey rice soup, turkey taco filling, turkey this, turkey that. If you only have turkey a couple of times a month, you don't get sick of it. I swear to you it's true.

***

If you take away only one thing from this post, make it this: Don't make yourself crazy over a single feast. Bodies are adaptable. One day of breaking your diet isn't going to wreck your metabolism or your life. If you want the damn pie, eat the damn pie.

***

These moments of festive low-carb blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe, and happy Thanksgiving!

We scream for keto ice cream.

So it's been about two-and-a-half years since I began following a low-carb diet, and it's still helping me to control my blood glucose levels without medication.

The thing is, though, sometimes you want a little something other than protein and veggies. And over the past few years, food manufacturers have rushed in -- as they are wont to do -- to provide junk food that's low in carbs. Low carb seems to be too nebulous a term for these corporations, so instead they've latched onto the term keto. Now you can find bread, ready-to-eat cereal, cookies, crackers, granola bars, and even ice cream, all trumpeting their keto cred. 

But how do they taste? 

Ah, there's the rub. 

Manufacturers use a few standard strategies for making foods keto. One is to rely on fat to boost the flavor, so you see a lot of stuff with peanut butter in it. Full-fat dairy is another go-to. But regular desserts rely on sugar for a lot of their taste, and Americans in particular have been trained to like their food really sweet. Enter sugar substitutes. Some of them taste okay, but some, like monkfruit, have an odd aftertaste. Also, for many folks, eating too much of them -- particularly the sugar alcohols -- can lead to a bout of diarrhea. And you may have recently heard about the World Health Organization's claim that aspertame, which has been used in diet sodas for years, might be carcinogenic. Nobody's banning the stuff yet; I suspect they remember the rush-to-judgment on saccharine in 1981. Instead, the message is to eat sugar substitutes in moderation.

Which brings us to keto ice cream. Some brands trumpet single-digit net carbs in a whole pint, which would seem to encourage people to eat the entire thing at once. But if you're going to maybe risk your health, which brands are worth it? In other words, how do they taste?

I've tried a few now, and I can tell you there aren't many that are worth spending the cash and carbs on. Some are well-reviewed, but I didn't like them because the texture was odd. Most say on the package that they'll be creamier if you let them sit out on the counter for about 15 minutes, but in a lot of cases, they still sort of splintered when I tried to scoop them. A number of them had a weird consistency, almost like ice milk (remember that stuff?), and some had an aftertaste.

Two passed muster. Here is one of them: 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

Nick's is a Swedish company that turns out some pretty decent low-carb foods. I have tried and liked their protein bars. (One of these days I'll do a post on keto bars. Stay tuned.) So when I saw their ice cream in the freezer section the other day, I knew I had to try it. And it's good! The "triple choklad" has a slightly odd taste, but I liked it well enough to buy it a second time. The "salta karamell" not only tastes like salted caramel, but it actually scoops instead of splintering. 

The other keto ice cream I liked is from Mammoth Creameries. This is technically frozen custard, not ice cream -- it's made with egg yolks as well as milk and a sweetener. I tried the lemon buttercream flavor, and I liked it a lot. It's not super-sweet, and the mouthfeel is amazing. Mammoth gets bonus points from me for avoiding the use of unpronounceable ingredients; they use xylitol as the sweetener, but everything else is regular food.

The biggest drawback to these desserts is the price: they are all several dollars more per pint than a premium ice cream like Ben and Jerry's. Mammoth was the most expensive, but Nick's wasn't much cheaper (I only bought two flavors because it was on sale). 

But maybe that's a plus, since we're supposed to be eating this stuff in moderation. Right?

***

By the way, I'm not getting a kickback from anybody for recommending these products. Which I suspect is not true for the reviewers of the ice cream brands I didn't like. ("Dig in"? Seriously? How do you do that when the splinters skitter across the counter?)

***

These moments of opinionated blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

More on low carbing and such.

 

Bubble Beanie | Deposit Photos

Before I move on from the topic of low carbing (trust me, I will move on!), I wanted to clear up a few things.

After last week's post, I had a few questions about whether low carb is the same thing as gluten free. Short answer: It's not. Here's why.

Gluten is the thing that holds bread together. It's a protein found in wheat and certain other grains (there's a list at the link). Folks with celiac disease, which is an autoimmune disease, can't eat anything with gluten in it, because their bodies fight back by attacking the lining of the small intestine. Eventually it affects their body's ability to absorb nutrients from the food they eat. The symptoms range from bloating, constipation and diarrhea to migraines to anemia to anxiety. Not everybody gets all of the symptoms, and some folks get none of them. There's a test your doctor can give you to find out whether you have the disease.

Then there are the folks who don't have celiac disease, but they're sensitive to gluten. They feel better when they avoid foods containing it.

Lots of foods are high in carbs but have zero gluten -- for example, potatoes, tortilla chips, candy*, and regular sodas. Some types of flour are okay for the gluten-free crowd but have too many carbs for a low-carb diet -- for example, cornmeal and rice flour. By the same token, some flours are low carb but bad for the gluten-free crowd; I mentioned last week that vital wheat gluten is one of these. 

It gets crazier, particularly for folks with diabetes, because diabetics are virtually always told to eat whole grains like brown rice and whole wheat bread -- even though brown rice has a glycemic index (how quickly a food will raise your blood sugar, from 0 to 100) of 55 and whole wheat flour's glycemic index is 69.

Cornmeal's glycemic index is 70. Coconut flour, which shows up in a lot of low-carb foods, has a glycemic index of 50.

Now, 50 is supposedly pretty low. But compare it with almond flour's glycemic index of zero. And nuts, of course, have no gluten. So almond flour is a good choice for both folks avoiding carbs and folks avoiding gluten.

***

A word about the graphic up top: I'd never heard of a paleo AIP diet before, so I looked it up. 

I'd heard of paleo, which is all about eating like our Neanderthal forebears did. You're allowed meat, seafood, eggs, fruits, veggies, and nuts and seeds. Verboten foods include beans and legumes, dairy, refined sugars, grains, any flour, anything fermented, and coffee. I couldn't tell you why some of these foods are off limits -- seems like even a Neanderthal could gather wild grains for porridge or something -- but anyway, that's how the eating plan works.

AIP was a new one on me. It's short for "autoimmune protocol," and it's basically an elimination diet to help reduce inflammation, which is suspected to cause some autoimmune disorders. First you do a version of paleo for a few weeks; then you gradually add back in certain foods and keep track of whether they make your symptoms worse.

***

Speaking of nuts and diabetes: This past week, the American Academy of Pediatrics made me all kinds of crazy when they issued new guidelines for treating obesity in children. The AAP is now recommending that pediatricians prescribe weight loss drugs for kids as young as 12 and bariatric surgery for kids 13 and up. For the younger set -- maybe as young as six, or even two! -- doctors should embark on an intensive program of lifestyle therapy, including behavioral and nutritional advice, for both the child and the parents.

Do you suppose it's a coincidence that this new, intensive approach has followed so closely on the heels of the Food and Drug Administration's approval of Wegovy (a.k.a. Ozempic, an injectible drug for diabetes) as a weight loss drug for kids as young as 12? Yeah, neither do I.

The AAP says the old approach of waiting to see whether the kid will outgrow the fat isn't working anymore. Too many fat kids are turning into fat teens, the AAP says, with the attendant risks of heart disease and diabetes and yada yada. Okay, but much of the weight loss advice I've received from doctors and dieticians over the years has been simplistic, outdated, and just plain wrong. Do we really want to hand our kids over to Big Pharma and Big Diet? Because it'll be lobbyists from those industries that shape the assistance our kids get, and I don't trust those lobbyists to be helpful to anyone but their investors.

Remember when Big Tobacco promised to 'fess up about how unhealthy and addictive smoking is, and then finessed their way around that promise? If you don't think this thing with kids and obesity is going to go down the same road, you're living in a fantasy world.

***

*You'd be surprised what manufacturers sneak flour into. Even some candies have flour in them -- caramel creams immediately come to mind. Gotta check the ingredients on everything.

*** 

These moments of floury blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Low carb bread at high altitude.

So I've been low carbing* for two years now, and it has paid off. As I explained in my year one recap, I didn't start doing it to lose weight; I started doing it to bring my blood glucose down. It has worked so well that this fall, my endocrinologist told me to stop taking my diabetes medications. Go me!

But y'know, sometimes a woman wants a sandwich. And I am here to tell you that the low-carb bread options out there are not only expensive, but also not that great. ThinSlim makes decent bagels and hamburger buns, but I wasn't nuts about their bread. Carbonaut tastes like sawdust to me. Oroweat (Arnold's east of the Mississippi) is decent, but the slices are so small. And they're all crazy expensive. There are other things to wrap around sandwich fillings, but they're not bread, y'know? So basically I've been going without.

And then Dash sent me an email that said they were selling their bread machines super cheap at their website. (Looks like they still are!) So I bought one. And then I set about trying to make low-carb bread at home.

It turns out that making bread at 7,000 feet is as much art as science. Because the air pressure is lower up here, your dough rises faster -- but it's also prone to collapse. Also, Santa Fe is dry, and the lack of moisture messes with the process, too. There are a bunch of ways to tweak your recipe to compensate (King Arthur has a whole list here), but you can't do some of them in a bread machine (i.e., lowering the baking temperature) because the machine only has pre-programmed options. Sure, I could mix the dough in the bread maker and bake it the regular way, but where's the fun in that?

Then there's the issue of flour. Almond flour is my go-to for almost everything low-carb, but it doesn't work for yeast bread. So off I went, looking for other options. The first recipe I tried was this low-carb bread recipe adapted for a bread machine, which I adapted further for high altitude (lowered the amount of yeast, dropped the allulose, and increased the salt). It calls for a bunch of crazy flours, which sent me on a grocery store scavenger hunt; the only one I had to order was the oat fiber. 

The loaf looked fabulous in the pan:

Lynne Cantwell 2023

But then I took it out and it fell. 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

It tastes good, though. But it's also pretty moist. I need to play with the recipe a little more.

The other recipe I've used is one that came with my bread machine. I substituted a measure-for-measure keto flour for the regular flour. 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

The kind I see in the stores here is by King Arthur, so I tried it -- and it works great! I added some vital wheat gluten, which is one of those tips and tricks I saw somewhere for high-altitude baking. I didn't get a picture of this loaf after I took it out of the pan, but trust me when I say that it didn't collapse. I was very excited.

Lynne Cantwell 2023

I wish the flour was less expensive, though. I go through about two-thirds of the tiny bag of flour with one loaf. That puts it in the same price range as the store bought kind -- but this tastes better.

So sandwiches are back on the menu here -- which makes Tigs very happy. He's developed a taste for lunchmeat, specifically Black Forest ham. Who am I to deny the little guy his ham, right?

***

*Low carb is not the same as keto. Keto is a low carb, high fat diet that requires you to keep your body in ketosis, in which it breaks down fat for fuel. A lot of folks do keto to lose weight. But that involves counting carbs, and after several decades of diets on which I counted this and that in order to lose weight, which either didn't work or only worked for a little while, I developed an eating disorder. So no counting stuff for me -- I'm just sticking to low-carb foods. And I don't care what the scale says.

***

These moments of bready blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

A year of low carbing.

Never fear -- I am not going to turn this into a diet blog, or a dieting blog, or a lifestyle change blog, or any permutation thereof. I don't pretend to be an expert on anything except myself. And I'm not trying to become an influencer, nor am I looking for sponsors.

I also didn't mean to start this post with a disclaimer, but there you have it.

I just wanted to let y'all know about a thing I've been doing for almost a year now. It's a low-carb diet, kinda sorta, and I kinda sorta came up with it myself -- which is to say it's not keto or Atkins or carb counting or any of those. 

If it's anything, it's based on an out-of-print book called The 30-Day Diabetes Cure. The link is to Amazon but don't buy it from them (how often do you hear me say that?) because they're charging a ridiculous amount for it; try Better World Books instead.

Some background: I've had type 2 diabetes for about ten years now. For a long time I was in denial -- mainly because the first thing any doctor will say to you, when you turn up in their office as diabetic or pre-diabetic, is to lose weight. But I'd been dieting since I was eleven years old and had lost hundreds of pounds, only to see them all come back -- and bring friends. At last, I concluded that diets don't work, and that in fact they only serve to line the pockets of the diet and fitness industry. But doctors don't want to hear that. If you tell a doctor that you're not going to go on a diet, they label you as uncooperative -- or worse.

I tried to cooperate -- a little. I went to see a dietitian, who tried to sell me meal-replacement shakes "to jump-start your weight loss." That's a diet, honey, so nope. Later, I saw another dietitian, who tried to get me to track what I was eating and how much and all that stuff. "Does that feel like a diet?" she asked me. Hell, yes, it does, and it's exactly what I swore I'd never do again. She eventually passed me off to another dietitian, who seemed enthusiastic when I mentioned low-carbing (I'd read online that it could work for diabetics - here's a recent study), but of course she wanted me to track my carbs and -- all together now -- THAT'S A DIET.

What I needed was for somebody to tell me which types of foods to stay away from. But nobody wants to do that, and I have a feeling it's because they're in cahoots with the food manufacturers and Big Pharma -- industries that would rather sell you highly processed foods, fake sweeteners, and expensive drugs so new that there are no generics for them. But that's a whole 'nother blog post or three. 

Anyway, this book: A clerk in a vitamin-supplement store here in Santa Fe recommended it to me. "Diabetes is all about what you eat," she said. And I thought, if this book will tell me what to eat to bring my blood sugar down, I'm in. So I ordered a copy and read it. Then, a year ago this week, I started doing it.

For the first ten days, you get no sugar, no alcohol, and no carbs. Most veggies are okay, but no fruits. That's supposed to bring your blood sugar down to normal. Mine was pretty high at the time, even with the super-expensive drugs I was on, so I didn't get to normal in ten days -- but my readings did drop a significant amount. So I kept doing it.

It's been a year, as I said. I've been off the super-expensive drugs for months. My blood sugar is still not quite normal, but it's close. I've lost about 25 pounds and have kept it off, which is huge for me; if I were concentrating on losing weight, I would have given up in frustration months ago.

Here's a funny thing: I'm not interested in sweets or high-carb foods. I suspect it's because I'm not eating them, so there's no craving to trigger. In fact, I can taste hidden sugars in restaurant foods now -- and I don't like them.

That doesn't mean I'm eating bland meals. Here's my dinner tonight: ham and provolone with brown mustard on almond-flour rolls, broccoli slaw, and a dill pickle spear. 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

The key is to include lots of veggies and make most of your food from scratch. But I'm not a kitchen slave; the broccoli slaw dressing has five ingredients and whipped up in about two minutes, and the slaw itself came in a bag from Trader Joe's.

I'm not saying this will work for everybody. But it makes sense that if eating carbs raises your blood sugar, not eating them will lower it. And I've never had a doctor, or a diabetes educator, or a dietitian flat-out tell me that. I had to find out on my own. 

So now I've told you.

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These moments of non-dieting blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed! Wear a mask!