Rand Wacker

We’ve never been a fan of the no-carb diet craze that has been so popular around the country. Besides the long-term health impacts, I think that the whole idea of meat-meat-meat eating is just a little too wasteful (a la most everything else in America). Brain made an insightful comment the other day in that, “if you describe the health problems in America due to our food intake to someone in other parts of the world, they would either laugh hysterically or get very very angry.”

While Lex and I eat fairly balanced diets, and we do a lot of cooking of different things for a wide variety of different foods, I have noticed lately that we’ve started to eat/drink a little too much sugar. Baking cookies at home, sugar in my coffee/tea, even Alexis’s favorite cranberry juice cocktail is loaded with sucrose. The result has been an increase in blood sugar swings due to my somewhat sensitive insulin levels (I wouldn’t say diabetic, but there is a tendency that way in my family). Neither of us are overweight by any means, but since we’re getting “older” I’ve noticed that the winter weight didn’t really come off this summer.

She picked up a copy of The South Beach Diet because she had heard it was written by a cardiologist and focused on blood chemistry more than weight-loss. As I read through the text more and more I was interested to see that it reflected a lot of what my parents have always been telling me about eating. My Mom has always come from a granola-y health foods background and pushes whole grains, less sugars, less processed food. My Dad has always come from a scientific background WRT diet and preaches staying away from refined sugars and white breads, pastas, etc. In retrospect they were both preaching the same things, I just heard them differently.

In essence, it appears to me what The South Beach is all about. Their slant is not to cut carbs out completely, ratchet down calorie intakes, or create a special balance of protien/fat/carbs. The basic idea is to regulate blood chemistry and insulin production by avoiding the refined and processed sugars and carbs that have become such a mainstay of the American diet. Examples of why is is bad abound in the text. For example, eating a donut in the middle of the morning might fill you up temporarily, but there is so much sugar (both in the sweet and the white flour of the cake itself) that it is going to spike your insulin production really high, and when the sugar is processed out of your bloodstream your are going to crash, get hungry, and probably eat something else really bad for you (this whole cycle really resonates with me at the office). Instead, the recommendation is to be sure to eat meals that are going to process through your system slowly, eat good snacks in between meals to keep your blood sugar from dropping too rapidly, and most of all, take everything in moderation.

The diet starts out with a pretty draconian two weeks of no sugars/dairy/breads, in an attempt not to rid yourself of carbs and send your body into a cannibalizing state of ketosis, but to break your dependancy on those sugar fixes which cause the insulin roller coaster. During these two weeks you eat usually eggs/omelets for breakfast, salads with some protein at lunch, and then a fish or lean meat entree with lots of good green veggies on the side. No Cokes, no bread, no fruit, and hardest for me probably…no beer (the maltose in beer has the highest glycemic index of all sugars). After the first two weeks are up things become a bit more liberal. You can re-introduce things like whole fruit and red wine, and bread/pasta/rice can be had in limited amounts as long as you opt for whole-grain versions and (counter-intuitively) make sure to eat them with some fats (like good olive oil) in order to slow their digestion. Again, the whole idea is to prevent the sugar roller coaster (the book likens eating a slice of white bread on its own to consuming a tablespoon of sugar…an image that sticks with you).

A lot of attention is paid to what kind of processed foods you’re buying. The “low-fat” craze of the past 20 years (before Atkins) saw many companies replace the fat in their food with, usually, plain sugar. So for example, “light” mayonnaise has fewer calories from fat, but the third ingredient on the list is corn syrup! The South Beach claims that people should be aware of what fats are “good” and “bad”, and choose wisely (olive oil, canola oil, and eggs are all good fat, so regular mayo is OK; butter is bad fat…but still not nearly as bad as trans-fats). When talking about this with Rob he likened a lot of ideas like this to what he’s been reading in The Mediterranean Diet, which talks a lot about the good fats found in natural oils, cheeses, nuts, etc. So today was our first day of Phase 1 on the diet.

We’ve been preparing for the past week knowing that we couldn’t start with Lex in her crazy two-job schedule. Yesterday was a fun morning at Berkeley Bowl as we started to get really creative about what we could do with the ingredients we knew we could use (the meal plans in the book are somewhat limiting). Today I’ve been cooking most of the morning in order to get meals ready for us to take to work over the next week (I think we’ll end us saving money on this plan as well since we’ll be doing a lot more cooking at home). All in all I like that fact that I’m taking the time to think a lot more about what I’m eating and to take care in preparing food for me and my family. Its a fun reason to extend our usual breadth of dishes, and I’m hoping it will get us both thinking with a more open mind about some different food alternatives. So, lets see what happens…

Update: Two weeks later…