Attack of the low carb diet!

So if you have been wondering why there hasn't been any posts for a bit, it is due to extreme dieting, which I do NOT recommend to anyone.  When Josh and I first started seeing each other a few years back, we both could have stood to loose 20-30lbs.  During our first few years, we hadn't quite found our groove when it came to cooking and eating healthy, so we put on a few more pounds.  When we finally decided to change the way we ate, and start cooking things from scratch, we had a lot of weight to take off.

Josh is a few years younger than me, and he originally embraced the changes in diet more than I did.  He also started to add exercise to his routine, which is something that I am still struggling to do regularly.  So while the changes to healthy cooking and eating worked great for Josh to drop the pounds, the weight has been slower to go down for me.  So after hitting a plateau since November, and only loosing about 2 lbs from November till May, I decided to throw a huge curve ball to my body.

I decided to start doing Atkins again.     I had done this diet twice before in my life.  The first time, I lost a ton of weight, and it worked great.  The second time I did it, was after all the fake "Low Carb" processed food came out.  Can you guess how much weight I lost that time?  So I decided to actually do Atkins again, but to en-corporate our desire to eat real food, and to keep the processed and artificial foods out of the diet.  Well, it appears to be working.

All of the processed foods morph things that are in no way food into something they say you are supposed to eat.  Most of them try to mimic a carb, or starchy type food. Most of them are not very good, and even though they are officially low carb, some people actually process more of the net carbs than the package claims.  Also, a bag of low carb crackers, or breads still has a ton of calories, which will pack on the pounds if you include them regularly.  Your body thinks you are eating bread, so you don't think twice about eating a few slices.  Try eating massive quantities of eggs, or other protein rich foods.  It isn't that easy.

My take on the diet, is that you never are really that hungry, as you never get a spike in blood sugar, or insulin, which results in you eating less.  Also as I said above, while it might be easy to sit down and eat a bag of Doritos on the couch, you can only eat so much meat before you feel really ill.

It has been fun learning different ways of cooking things, and trying to make decent meals under this diet.  Josh has learned that sometimes, he will just have to have a separate meal, if he wants good food.  Two hotdogs with mustard, and no buns is not all that interesting of a meal.  It is weird have a two cheeseburgers with no buns on my plate as weight loss food, while not being able to eat the fresh strawberries from the garden.

So some of my next posts might be low carb versions of traditional dishes, or just meals that are naturally low carb without trying to be a substitute food.  Either way, we are still cooking and eating, but it is definitely not the good food that we were eating before.