YOU’RE going to a low-carb conference and the car Muzak is “Chasing Cars.”
Are you? Chasing cars? “Chasing cars/Around our heads,” that is.
I love that song, by the way.
“If I lay here/If I just lay here/Would you lie with me and just forget the world?/Forget what we're told/Before we get too old.”
Sigh.
The low-carb community had its 2nd Northern Mindanao Lowcarb Conference last weekend with the theme, “Empower Your Lowcarb Wellness Journey.” Based on the feedback from the low-carbers there, I can now say we’re not chasing carbs anymore.
I’ve been low-carb for almost three years now. As I always wrote in previous columns, struggle is real in this journey. Meaning, there were times when I’d eat high-carb food—halo-halo, baked goodies—and immediately experience the side effects right after, which would then result to me saying, Never again!
Yeah, right.
Thus, here’s hoping the low-carb conferences here in Cagayan de Oro will become an annual event every January as a timely reminder for low-carbers to stay the course.
January is the best time for these conferences, to help the misbehaving low-carber in her diet reset and restart after the Christmas indulgence.
The advice from low-carb doctors and coaches is to always go back to low-carb in the next meal after a carbo-loading episode.
Even if the indulgence has worsened to a series of high-carb meals, the advice is still to go back to low-carb in the next meal. Once you’ve experienced the feeling of being fat-adapted, you’ll surely miss that after a series of high-carb meals, anyway.
My deep why of going low-carb has always been to cure my hypertension. But the sugar addiction is proving to be stronger than that deep why. Moderation doesn’t work for me when it comes to carbs. That’s why an elimination diet is the best for me. No carbs. That’s it.
There’s this mistaken belief that rice is okay because it’s not sweet. I can get tired explaining the science behind it because science was never my favorite subject in school, and it’s still not the kind of topic I love to discuss.
Since I’m now transitioning to carnivore, what’s essential for me is the food allowed in the carnivore diet. That’s all I have to remember rather than memorizing hormones and the anatomy of human beings and how cells work.
Carnivore is the animal diet. Or mananap, as a Mindanaoan low-carb doctor calls it. If it’s not an animal or animal product, I’m not eating it. That’s the KISS approach: Keep It Simple, Stup… Er, Keep It Simply Simple.
The carnivore diet’s simplicity makes it the easiest to follow.
At a pizza place, for example, I focused first on the chicken strips. And then I started removing chicken from the pasta. And moved on to scraping toppings off the pizza. My plate had a mountain of square pizza crusts after that Friday lunch.
For Sunday lunch with the family, we went to a steakhouse where the main ingredient is meat, of course. Ribeyes, anyone? Then we transferred to a coffee shop where I ordered smoked ham omelette. This was the day after the Low Carb Conference so I guess the refresher worked.
Is the carnivore diet finally becoming a hard habit to break for me? Hmmm.
