IT’S a month before Christmas Eve, and my noche buena has already begun. If only I can have lechon and dinuguan daily, sticking to the carnivore diet will be fine, thank you.
But I can always find an excuse to be non-carnivore. Pinas is a high-carb country. The Pinoy eats rice and treats it as his main source of energy. Just add cooking oil and soy sauce to make it palatable. And there’s instant noodles: just add an egg.
So, how to avoid carbs in a country where unli-rice is the major attraction at some restos, donut shops give a free donut for every drink order, sweet spaghetti is the favorite of every Pinoy kid, Jollibee not only means Yumburgers and Chicken Joy and the Chicken Sandwich Supreme but also peach mango pie, and all kinds of kakanin and baked goodies are sold here, there, and everywhere?
Desserts and high-carb snacks are the norms here. Even the pre-breakfast, upon waking up, is pandesal dipped in 3-in-1 coffee. The real breakfast will be an hour or two after, this time with tocino, longganisa, danggit, corned beef, sausages, hotdogs, luncheon meat, or daing na bangus paired with fried rice and eggs. Yum!
A low-carb dieter will always be tempted to taste-test the food that high-carb dieters are ordering. Halo-halo, for example, is the most difficult dessert to avoid in Pinas since almost every resto menu has it. Even in foreign countries, it may have some other name but once the Pinoy sees it, he knows it’s the same as the halo-halo back home.
There’s the low-carb dieter behaving while ordering sinugbang baboy and kinilaw, but then he will go to the menu’s dessert section and ends up ordering halo-halo.
How to restart, reset, reboot, refresh, rewind, so, he can go back to strict low-carb? That’s the question.
First of all, just go back to low-carb in your next meal. Therefore, don’t go to a donut shop after your high-carb lunch. For sure, you’ll end up ordering coffee with everything on it, and will devour the free donut that goes with it.
Even chicken can be covered with all sorts of batter perhaps to mask its distinct taste which non-chicken eaters have been avoiding, the same way Atty. Zuleika Lopez desperately tried to avoid her transfer from St. Luke’s Medical Center to the Veterans Memorial Medical Center.
In 2022 when then presidential candidate BBM and then vice-presidential candidate Sara Duterte were still UniTeam friends, the recent scenario starring Lopez would have been unthinkable. But my low-carb diet was already thinkable since I started that diet in February 2022.
Zoom to 2024: PBBM and VP Duterte are no longer friends, Lopez is suddenly popular, and here I am struggling to stick to the low-carb diet. Any connection there? But I don’t even listen to the news anymore. All I wanna do is to dance to Flowerovlove’s “Breaking News.”
Now, please define “no longer friends.” Hmmm. It has reached the point of no return now that VP Duterte has revealed there’s an assassination plot against her: “Don’t worry about my security because I’ve talked with somebody. I said, ‘If I’m killed, you’ll kill BBM, Liza Araneta and Martin Romualdez. No joke, no joke.’”
Hmmm. Popcorn, please. Oops. That’s high-carb.
