When my little girl’s dad and I moved in together last year, we combined two cast-iron cookware collections along with two households. He has this piece that’s basically a flat skillet with no sides and no skillet handle, just this metal loop thing for hanging it over a campfire. I can’t imagine who would camp with this thing. Anything cooking on it would tip into the fire if you looked at it cross-eyed. I can’t drain fat from this thing very easily, either, when I’ve been frying bacon or whatever. So I couldn’t think of a use for it, so I pretty much ignored it.
Until now.
Yes indeedy kids: you can have pizza on a low-carb diet. The crust for this is from Miss Jamie’s blog, and you should go there if you’re running on empty for LC recipes you can stand to eat*. I won’t go so far as to say her cauliflower crust is exactly like wheat, but it does the trick. Even my daughter likes this stuff–and getting a five-year-old to like cauliflower is something on the order of a minor miracle.
Part of successful LCing, or any successful lifestyle change, is to stop thinking in terms of objects and start thinking in terms of function. You don’t need the wheat-crust object, you need a food that serves the function of holding pizza toppings. Voilà. Pizza. Practically no carbs, compared with its wheatier cousin. Chock-full of goodness, too.
I’m getting along. Weigh-in’s tomorrow. I haven’t tried the socks-and-underwear-before-breakfast method in between, only checked in passing while fully clothed, so I have no idea whether I have gained, lost, or held steady. Well, OK, if I’ve gained it hasn’t been much. I still check in at under 250 even in a sweatshirt and two layers of pants.
I haven’t been tracking food real well though. And I’ve cut corners a bit. Like last night, we needed to use up some beef in the fridge and I had had teriyaki chicken scheduled for that Monday, but I didn’t have the chicken thawed, so I used the beef instead. And I didn’t want to fuss with sweetening the stupid sauce after cooking everything according to the recipe, because as I understand it stevia doesn’t hold up to heat very well, yet it’s the only non-nutritive sweetener Matt can stand to eat. Every other one gives him killer headaches, even sugar alcohols. So I broke out the sweetened soy sauce instead and used that, and did a half-assed stir-fry. I figured it wouldn’t be that big a deal.
I also have been noshin’ on commercial beef jerky but you have to watch that one. They think salt will kill us, so they preserve the stuff with sugar instead. Oy vey. I don’t know about you, but my BP only gets wonky when I’ve been going crazy on the sugar. Now if I had kidney damage, then maybe I could see excess salt causing a problem–but define excess. So many people are walking around with fucked-up thyroids now and you can’t tell me it’s a genetic change. Where’s their iodine if they’re going low-salt? How many of them eat fish guts or seaweed? Not many, I bet. I eat seaweed, but not often enough so I’m perfectly happy to resort to iodized salt. It doesn’t faze me. And my dad’s on BP meds. I don’t get it.
So I have to watch my jerky intake even though the meat itself is not a problem because these idiots want to turn my beef into candy. I can see it now, we’ll be making homemade jerky again soon. Then, of course, we won’t be able to keep it in the house, because it tastes much better than that MSG-laden, sugar-saturated crap from the store. Turns out cheaper per ounce, too.
er… I had a point. Anyway, yeah, bad Dana, I want to track my intake as much as possible to keep myself honest and to be aware of nutrient balance, but sometimes you just want to take a break, I guess. But I have not taken a break from LCing.
In fact–oh yeah, that’s right. Wanted to share. So, about a week ago I guess, maybe a week and a half, Matt brought home some Wendy’s for me because I didn’t want to deal with cooking and because he was taking our daughter to another fast-food place for its indoor playground. In case you’ve missed it, we’ve been having crappy weather for most of the time since the beginning of the year. She needs to get her wiggle out from time to time and a fast-food place is the cheapest place to do it. So he brought me food before they went. I sat there and looked at that Baconator and thought, “I could eat the bun just this once and it wouldn’t hurt anything, I’ve done it before and stayed in ketosis. Besides, that thing’s messy.”
Well, I took one bite of it with the bun on, enough to get tiny nibbles off the bun. Then I came to my senses. Put the bun aside, ate the burger one patty at a time (complete with bacon on each one… MMM), had my salad and called it good.
This last Sunday, Valentine’s Day, we went to the discount theater to see The Princess and the Frog. I was tempted to just have the popcorn and call it good. Then I realized I still had most of a bag of pork rinds at my desk. I usually take my knitting with me to do in the car, and in the theater while the lights are still up during the previews, so I stuffed the pork rind bag in the bottom of my knitting bag and covered it up with my project and our scarves and hats. Pork rinds kinda dry your mouth out, but they had diet Coke at the theater. Presto. I had a snack and didn’t have to regret it later.
I appreciate that some theaters have slightly healthier offerings, like bottled water and salads, and I’ve even seen prepackaged bags of “gourmet” popcorn that’s got, like, I dunno, real butter on it and cheese and stuff. Cool. But dammit… Dear movie theater people, you have scads and scads of bags of sugar and junk all over the snack counter. Is it too much to ask for some more low-carb offerings even if you think they’re horrible for people? Really. You have NO damn room to talk, so spare me the bullshit and fork it over. I shouldn’t have to risk getting kicked out just to stick to my diet. Thanks in advance.
But anyway, there you go. I don’t know what the difference is, but every other time I’ve tried this I have succumbed to temptation, and this time I’m not, for some reason. There have been a couple of times I’ve snuck one rice cracker when getting some out of the cabinet for my daughter, but that’s one rice cracker in a day, pretty much negligible. I’m doing pretty damn well. I hope it lasts.
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*Low-carb foods–and here I mean whole foods, not those abominations they sell to poor suckers who are jonesing for candy and bread–are actually pretty tasty, but if you want to eat foods similar to what everyone else is eating, that leaves you on a bit of a learning curve most of the time.
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