No More Counting, and Other Atkins Musings

April 1st marks 14 months of 100% low-carb eating. As I've mentioned before, my Paleo/Primal journey originally began as yet another attempt (#234238432432 since 2004) at low-carb/Atkins that turned into the Cave(wo)man Lifestyle pretty early on and has completely changed my life. Following Paleo makes me feel so much better than Atkins ever did-- I'm not eating anything fake, I can actually eat fruit(!!), and I don't have to count carbs. From January 2004 to February 2010, I counted carbs... even when I was following the SAD. After that first time doing Atkins, however, carb-counting took over my life-- even now, I can probably tell you the carb-count of probably every food (and food product), and I still sometimes calculate how many carbs are in a certain meal. Old habits die hard, I suppose...

Atkins knew what he was talking about, of course-- weight loss/maintenance is carb-related. Does the magic number of 20 carbs (during the first phase) really matter, though? Eh, maybe, if you're on the SAD. Counting to twenty so many times certainly worked for me (and many others) during my SAD years, but I still feel much better (and healthier) eating many more carbs now.... because they're good carbs. Not all carbs are created equal-- one slice of bread is about 12 carbs, but so is one cup of strawberries (and one Oreo is about 22, yet so is one banana), which is why carb-counting can sometimes be a bit silly too. Speaking of fruits*, I obviously avoided them while on Atkins because they'll make you go over 20 carbs-- yet fruit is definitely a necessary part of a healthy lifestyle.

*Note: if you're trying to lose weight, limit your fruit intake due to the high sugar-content in some of them. But if you're eating just to maintain a healthy weight, fruit is fantastic!

Atkins also lets you eat low-carb (henceforth LC) protein bars and shakes; LC versions of bread (and other bread products), ice cream, milk, and candy; and allows artificial sweeteners. None of that stuff is real! Legumes, grains, and other non-Paleo foods are also allowed (and, sometimes, encouraged), which makes no sense now. So it's okay to eat chemicals, but not fruits? I can eat twenty carbs of artificial crap, but I can't have an orange because god-forbid I go over the daily carb-count? Insanity!

I'm so glad I'm done with that.

The point I'm making here is that you don't need to count anything while eating Paleo/Primal. When all your food is real and healthy, it's completely unnecessary! What a relief! You will not gain weight if you follow the Paleo/Primal lifestyle.

Dieters are always so obsessed with carb and calorie counts that food consumption goes from "I'm eating this delicious salad" to "I'm eating X-amount of calories/carbs." My meals are so much more enjoyable now that I think of food as food and not a bunch of numbers.

And that is why this has become a permanent lifestyle.

Day 9 Update:

I'm wearing those jeans that were just a little too tight over a week ago!

Anyone else super pumped for this?:

Paleo Magazine!!!! So exciting!!!!!!

Quote of the Day:

"My patient population has a low recidivism rate, but if they haven't made up their minds that it is permanent, then of course, they will fail." -Dr. Robert Atkins

Awesome comparison chart (Atkins/LC vs. Paleo vs. Weston Price) from Weight Maven:

If you're starting out and need to carb-count, Mark Sisson's got you covered:

Etymology of "Diet"

When we hear the word diet, we probably think of it to mean a way of eating that restricts certain food groups ("a low-carb diet"), or a term used by food businesses to make you think their products are healthy when, in reality, they're pumped with chemicals ("Diet Coke"). When we hear this word, we almost always associate it with food (or lack thereof).

However, diet comes from a Greek word meaning "lifestyle," which is a definition that doesn't mention food at all! While the Oxford English Dictionary considers this meaning for diet obsolete, it is still the first entry that appears!

The word diet bothers a lot of people in regards to Paleo/Primal eating. I read a blog a few days ago by someone who absolutely refuses to read Robb Wolf's The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet and Loren Cordain's The Paleo Diet because of this little four-letter word on the front cover, using the reasoning that diet means it's not a permanent thing. I can understand the objection to the word (but not the refusal to read those two amazing books), because every time I've gone on a diet, it was only temporary and I went right back to my old eating habits after I lost some weight.

When I first started thinking about my low-carb/real food diet as a lifestyle (before I knew that it was called Paleo/Primal), I became extremely objected to the word too-- about seven months into eating this way (at some point last September), I had my first real issue with diet. I had dinner with a friend who I hadn't seen since the spring, and he commented on my salad, even though the dining hall was having a pasta night. I responded with "I don't eat grains," and he asked, "What? Are you on the Atkins diet?" It was the first time I thought of my way of eating as a lifestyle, rather than a diet, and I told him so: "No. I just don't eat processed foods." I remember actually being offended that my friend referred to my eating habits as a diet!

Being a linguistics major (and just a bit of a nerd in general), I went back to my dorm and looked up the word diet in the OED (which provides the etymology of essentially every word in the English language) and was amazed at the definition in the first entry: "diet, n. 1. Course of life: way of living or thinking." What?! Diet hasn't always meant "food restriction"?!?! I learned that diet was borrowed into English via Old French (diete) via Latin (diæta) via the Greek word δίαιτα (diaita), meaning "mode of life" or "lifestyle."

Although the use of diet to mean "lifestyle" is obsolete today, this etymological information no longer makes me objected to the use of the word to describe eating Paleo/Primal. I'm still not crazy about the word diet because of its negative connotations, however-- I much prefer calling it a "lifestyle," or even the (slightly redundant) "Paleo/Primal Diet Lifestyle."

Whether it's a "diet" or a "lifestyle," eating Paleo/Primal/Caveman/Real Food is the way to go!

Quote of the Day:

"Every human being is the author of his own health or disease." -Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama)

(Doing an I.F., so no fun pictures today!)