Seafood diet

JAZZ music in a Chinese resto. Chilling while gobbling down tons of sweet and sour pork, beef with broccoli, and fried peanuts, and chugging hot tea.

By the way, the peanuts and tea were free. I guess the dish we ordered had some perks.

My carnivore tummy immediately reacted to the broccoli, peanuts, and tea through its favorite form of protest—bloating. It doesn’t like nuts, fruits, veggies, and other plants anymore. Surprisingly, it still likes chocolates. It remains calm and silent after a dessert of low-carb chocolate ice cream.

For other low-carb goodies, it’s my blood pressure that says, Nooo! Enough already! This must be the reader’s reaction, too, each time I write about the low-carb diet. Haha!

Talk of food, haven’t you noticed that “The Little Mermaid” has lots of seafood? Starting with Ursula, an octopus. That is if you love Takoyaki balls.

And there’s Sebastian—a crab. Flounder—a fish. The “Kiss the Girl” scene has more. But while watching the live-action version, you’re thinking, Cute!, and not, Seafood, yum!

There’s this quote: “I’m on a seafood diet. I see food, and I eat it.” That’s how my high-carb diet was. No thinking twice at all. No discrimination. Equal rights and all that jazz.

Now, I see food and think twice. Because any food that’s not on the clean low-carb list can result in a five-pound weight gain overnight. The morning after, the weighing scale says, 129 pounds. The previous day, it was 124.4 pounds. What happened? The answer can be found in the daily food diary. That is if I need more hints aside from the elevated blood pressure and the itchy and runny nose.

The side effects of ingesting food that’s not on the clean low-carb list can be immediate: bloating, bum tummy, and headache. The rhinitis and body pains may start the next day. As if the body is saying, Now you know. While the low-carb list says, I told you so.

Like everything else in life, focus on your own low-carb journey. If you and your friend are now into the carnivore level of low-carb, you won’t have the same progress as hers since you’re not healing the same emotions, mental-health challenges, and diseases. To each his own. So, don’t compare.

Looking at the other side of the fence will only make you long for things that are not meant for you anyway. And if they’re not meant for you, those things won’t make you happy at all. For example, your next-door neighbor has a library, and you can see that reading makes her so happy. Based on that observation, you have a library built, too, for your own house and buy books to fill it up. Finally, you sit there and start reading, only to realize you hate to read.

Yes, that’s kind of an extreme example.

Let’s think of something simple.

Say, you’re in a restaurant, and the people sitting at the next table are saying “Yum!” in between bites of a particular dish. You then tell the wait staff, I’ll have what they’re having. The dish is then served to you, you eat a spoonful of it, and eww. They gave you the wrong dish. It’s bitter. That’s when you learn it’s ginisang ampalaya, the next table’s favorite veggie. That’s what you get for looking at the other side of the fence.