Fiber: Adequate fiber is an essential part of any healthful diet. Choosing vegetables and salads from the low-carbohydrate foods list will provide you with a fine fiber-rich program for those two meals. For your Reward Meal, you may select any fiber-rich food, including vegetables or any of the grains. Among our favorites is popcorn.
Condiments: At Low-Carbohydrate Meals (as well as the Reward Meal) you may use bouillon, consomm?, all herbs, vinegar, mustard, olives, pepper, salt, soy sauce, garlic, garlic or onion powder, hot sauce, and white horseradish. Avoid or limit catsup and relish.
Breads and cereals: Do not eat any of your usual breads, pancakes, cereals, or other breads and grains at your Low-Carbohydrate Meals. Even small amounts of most breads and cereals eaten at times other than during the hour of your Reward Meal will increase your insulin level, along with your appetite and your weight. However, we have provided recipes for special, low-carbohydrate alternatives.
Beverages: You may drink unlimited quantities of carbonated water, seltzer, club soda, or black coffee or tea.
Diet soda that has no fruit juice added is also acceptable. Read the label: if it contains more than four grams of carbohydrates per serving, avoid the drink except during your Reward Meal. You may add about two tablespoons of lime or lemon juice to tea or club soda.
If you prefer your coffee with milk or cream, you may have one cup of coffee each day with up to about two ounces of milk, cream or half-and-half. Cream substitute is also acceptable—if it contains two grams of carbohydrates or less per serving. Read the label. Be sure to complete your coffee within fifteen minutes.
Add sugar only at Reward Meals. Any sugar substitute that you use must have no more than two carbohydrate grams per serving.
All alcoholic beverages should be consumed during your Reward Meal only.
Fruits: Do not eat any fruits or drink any fruit juices except at your Reward Meal. Although fruit and fruit juices are healthful foods, consuming them even in small amounts can result in high insulin levels. High insulin levels, in turn, will almost certainly produce a hunger, a desire for more carbohydrates, and a slowing or stopping of your weight loss.
You may use one or two tablespoons of lime or lemon juice in tea, soda, or in cooking, at your Low-Carbohydrate Meals.
Drink Plenty of Water
Be sure to drink six to eight glasses of water or other noncaloric liquid each day. This is particularly important because many carbohydrate addicts do not drink enough liquids and may think they are craving foods when their bodies are actually thirsty.
Water is essential to your continued good health—drink at least six glasses daily.
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Myth Number 1: People Gain Weight Because They Eat Too Much
For decades, researchers have tried to discover a link between overweight and overeating. It seems logical, of course, in part because we’ve been taught since nursery school to believe that people who are fat must eat a lot (remember the Mother Goose rhyme? “Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean . . .”).
The results of the studies are surprising. Some researchers have tried to make people of average or “normal” weight become overweight. They have failed—even when normal people were fed as many as 3,000 extra calories daily. Their weight tended to increase a little and then level off; tests showed that the rate at which their bodies processed (metabolized) the foods increased so that they burned off the extra calories. In other studies, some overweight people were shown to be able to maintain their excess weight even when their food intake was severely restricted. Experiment after experiment has shown that overeating does not always result in overweight; nor is overweight always the result of overeating.
Observations in rats and farm animals support these findings. A genetic propensity for weight gain has been discovered in many varieties of laboratory animals; one is the Zucker rat. When these rats are fed the same diets, in the same quantities, and are exercised to the same degree as other rats that don’t have the same genetic tendency to obesity, the Zucker rats get fat whereas the other rats do not. Farmers, too, have found that certain strains of animals tend to be overweight—and they are willing to pay more for such animals as a result.
Why do we continue to think that humans are so different? Why do we insist that our weight is determined only by what we eat and not by the way our bodies use what we eat?
In the professional journals, scientists are likely to use terms like “energy intake” and “adiposity.” But the fact is that time and again the tests lead to the same surprising conclusion: Many people who overeat do not get fat and many people who are overweight do not overeat.
Myth Number 2: Overweight People Have Emotional Problems
Overweight men and women have often been characterized as being angry, dependent, and stubborn. They are said to hate their mothers or to be afraid of sex.
Dr. Albert Stunkard, a noted researcher in obesity at the University of Pennsylvania, has said that despite the common categorization of overweight people as “sickies” or “neurotics,” “. . . in almost every case, this was not found to be true.”
In study after study, overweight individuals have failed to reveal any consistent differences in emotional or mental health from those who are of normal weight. Simple obesity appears to be a physical disorder. According to the American Psychiatric Association, it is not, in most cases, to be associated with any distinct behavioral or psychological syndrome.
Myth Number 3: People Who Are Overweight Have No Willpower
Many believe that overweight people got that way because they couldn’t keep themselves from eating too much. Overweight and nonoverweight persons alike have adopted as true the idea that people with weight problems have no willpower.
On the contrary: Overweight people have not been shown to differ from their normal-weight counterparts in either behavioral or psychological ways. However, the blame placed on them—”It’s her own fault; she just eats too much”—produces an added frustration for the overweight person.
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OVERWEIGHT AND MYTHSMyth Number 1: People Gain Weight Because They Eat Too MuchFor decades, researchers have tried to discover a link between overweight and overeating. It seems logical, of course, in part because we’ve been taught since nursery school to believe that people who are fat must eat a lot (remember the Mother Goose rhyme? “Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean . . .”).The results of the studies are surprising. Some researchers have tried to make people of average or “normal” weight become overweight. They have failed—even when normal people were fed as many as 3,000 extra calories daily. Their weight tended to increase a little and then level off; tests showed that the rate at which their bodies processed (metabolized) the foods increased so that they burned off the extra calories. In other studies, some overweight people were shown to be able to maintain their excess weight even when their food intake was severely restricted. Experiment after experiment has shown that overeating does not always result in overweight; nor is overweight always the result of overeating.Observations in rats and farm animals support these findings. A genetic propensity for weight gain has been discovered in many varieties of laboratory animals; one is the Zucker rat. When these rats are fed the same diets, in the same quantities, and are exercised to the same degree as other rats that don’t have the same genetic tendency to obesity, the Zucker rats get fat whereas the other rats do not. Farmers, too, have found that certain strains of animals tend to be overweight—and they are willing to pay more for such animals as a result.Why do we continue to think that humans are so different? Why do we insist that our weight is determined only by what we eat and not by the way our bodies use what we eat?In the professional journals, scientists are likely to use terms like “energy intake” and “adiposity.” But the fact is that time and again the tests lead to the same surprising conclusion: Many people who overeat do not get fat and many people who are overweight do not overeat.
Myth Number 2: Overweight People Have Emotional ProblemsOverweight men and women have often been characterized as being angry, dependent, and stubborn. They are said to hate their mothers or to be afraid of sex.Dr. Albert Stunkard, a noted researcher in obesity at the University of Pennsylvania, has said that despite the common categorization of overweight people as “sickies” or “neurotics,” “. . . in almost every case, this was not found to be true.”In study after study, overweight individuals have failed to reveal any consistent differences in emotional or mental health from those who are of normal weight. Simple obesity appears to be a physical disorder. According to the American Psychiatric Association, it is not, in most cases, to be associated with any distinct behavioral or psychological syndrome.
Myth Number 3: People Who Are Overweight Have No WillpowerMany believe that overweight people got that way because they couldn’t keep themselves from eating too much. Overweight and nonoverweight persons alike have adopted as true the idea that people with weight problems have no willpower.On the contrary: Overweight people have not been shown to differ from their normal-weight counterparts in either behavioral or psychological ways. However, the blame placed on them—”It’s her own fault; she just eats too much”—produces an added frustration for the overweight person.*2\236\2*
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