Almost all of us are wont to say this or that is “only common sense.” Likewise, many of us see respect for each other and our shared humanity as right and necessary. Jen finally will have those baselines.

Background: The original post on her schooling and the bizarre, hostile behavior of school officials is here.

In the case of this smart, loving transgender child, only a family support system, augmented with the straight-ahead savvy and attitude of a GLAD lawyer brought respect and kindness. Jen’s mother and grandmother did battle as necessary school officials, while buoying Jen at home to compensate for the daily angst. They lavish praise on the GLAD attorney who helped them, or as they put it, “the most wonderful, caring, thoughtful, selfless man, My Attorney Janson!!!! He gave us more than we could ever ask for.”

And there you have it. Yes, he negotiated with school officials. He educated them (and Jen’s family) on the requirements and limits of the law. (The national Americans with Disability Act, for example, excludes transgender, relying on state statutes and public officials to be savvy and humane.) Certainly having legal oomph behind you never hurts.

The solution of switching schools would seem less than ideal. The other elementary school students were fine with Jen’s transition. It was only a parent or two and the administrators who were crazed over her closing the bathroom stall door once or twice a day. They should have been the ones to change and mature and humanize.

However, The key here is that Jen gets to be a student and a child and a girl in school. That really shouldn’t have been so hard.

Ah, it’s the annual series of Boston neighborhood coffees. Mayor Tom Menino truly loves these. He knows many in the crowds by both name and face. He gets to hand out pots of flowers to all comers. Dunkin’ provides coffee and Munchkins too.

Each neighborhood has a session in a park. You get the glad hand, a big smile, and this year a pot of salvia from da Mare. Oh, there are handouts about summer activities, his health challenge and such as well. Plus, there’s a chance to ask about things you care about, as I did.

Today’s in his Hyde Park was maybe cozier than some. It’s his Readville area and he knows even more locals than in some spots, calling out many by name even before he gets to the plant-distribution table.

Boston Parks and Rec. Commissioner Antonia Pollack joined him in handing out the pots from the city greenhouses. Last year, they were marigolds or salvia. I used the former to help guard my tomatoes from bugs, but the uxorial unit loves red salvia, so it’s still a win.

There were a bunch of uniformed cops and a detective or two, along with District City Councilor Rob Consalvo. It’s as jolly as any government function in town at 9 AM.

As a cyclist, I’m always asking him about his own biking. He previously told me how much he loved his newish recumbent bike. Then he broke some bones and for the three months as been in a protective boot and limping about.

Today he said he hoped to get it off next week. Then he doesn’t know when they’ll certifie the bones have healed enough for him to saddle up again. I encouraged him with a personal vignette about how I finally got a checkup after my broken leg with a surgeon who biked, and who told me, sure, it may hurt a little, but cycling will only increase the blood circulation and speed the healing. He seemed to like the sound of my version.

He did have to sit several times, apparently to rest the left foot and ankle. He also told staff that “These things are too long,” which I took to refer to how much time he spent on his sore limb.

He endured a different kind of pain, in Munchkin form. There were boxes of them about, including on the plant table. He did not eat a one. However, he was quick to offer the box to the little kids who came with parents or daycare providers. He’d urge them to take another and seemed to enjoy their smiles as much as those of the flower-taking crowd. (By far, the 100-plus crowd were largely grey. They too liked both the Munchkins and the fresh-fruit salad.)

Pollak said Menino was dieting and was enjoying the Munchkins vicariously. Likewise Consalvo had a diet soda in hand and avoided the sugar. They both seem to have taken the Mayor’s challenge seriously to get moving and lose a million collective Boston pounds.

For my concerns, Pollak and I chatted up the replacement process for Nicole Freedman, the bike tzarina. The likely replacement, Kris Carter, still has to go through the open-hiring process, but has a leg or more up. He’s been working on bike programs. Moreover, we all agree that Freedman made amazing process as well as laying out detailed plans. The new person doesn’t have to pioneer, just do the hard work of implementation including finding adequate funding.

Cross-post: This originally appeared at Marry in Massachusetts.

Now, I was also a scholar, but I was also a wrestler, then a swimmer into college. Compounding that, I was my high school paper’s sports editor. I didn’t want that spot, but it was the one that was open. Once I got to college and in J-school, I became the the loudmouthed pinko for the world to recognize.

Regardless, in my time and then our sons’, I went to a lot of sports dinners. The boys were (#1 son) baseball, (#2 and #3) soccer. #1 did crew in high school, following my edict that he had to do three years of some team sport, any team sport. Then he blissfully announced that he’d done his time. A deal is a deal in our house. I didn’t bother with his siblings. If they didn’t get the love of team sports in years of youth soccer, they didn’t. They didn’t.

My sports-dinner evenings seems Sisyphian even then. They were seasonal, so all the fall sports together, then the winter, then the spring. My high school had 2000 students…a lot of jocks. How many damned plaques can you call out in an evening? Something a little short of infinite!

Bromances flowed. Those of us with sainted coaches (Victor Liske for me) could go on and on and on. We did. I even wrote a farewell column to my coach, as our swim team was his last after over two decades. He was so fabulous as a person and mentor, his boys still quote it.

After my first such dinner though, I knew the routine and was resigned to it. What I came to resent was the blazer.

After a couple of years of lettering, I was due a PHS letterman sweater. Then the athletic director unilaterally decided that the sophisticated, manly option should be a blue blazer instead. Pissed I was. I had the letters and the team pins to attach to them. One did not sew a big maroon P on a blazer, nor dangle it before a current or potential girlfriend.

The solution wasn’t bad — go to the sporting goods store and buy the navy-blue sweater with the proper number of maroon stripes on the right arm. Yet, we in my situation thought of getting the sweater at the dinner as a reward for the agony, bruises and many hours of practices. Somehow the heavy-handed decision rankled.

Moreover, when we got the blazers, they sucked. Turns out that the school went as cheap as possible, which meant they were constructed in New Jersey prisons…badly. I have a huge chest and shoulders. The big sizes in particular had absurd shoulder pads, giving them the effect of bad formal football uniforms.

Fortunately, my grandfather, the man of many jobs and an unbelievable skill set, was among other things a tailor. I showed up with the stupid, insulting, ill-fitting, ugly blazer and started to complain. He was on it and shut me up. He took it next door to his dry cleaning and tailoring shop immediately. He returned in less than half an hour, with an altered, customized jacket. He’d taken in the waist to suit my build as well. The shoulders were flat and beautifully contoured. Granddad was an artist. I could only say thanks and wonder why I’d been upset.

Note on the tail end: The author buries links to three remarkable blogs on the very last page. These cover the brain and information processing. I am glad I plugged through the pretty tedious, tacked-on conclusion and found these gems.

You should also be aware that the author ran Barack Obama’s online campaign. He is never more than a few keystrokes from little d democracy, civil duty, and politics. None of that really gets in the way of his central message, nor distracts from the theory and processes he presents for dealing with too much and too much bad information. He also does not push his own left leaning on anyone. The principles are for all.

What you get with The Information Diet includes an overly wordy background on how we get and use our data, opinion and entertainment. Then, he presents the inherent problems and why we feel so overwhelmed. Of course, like any diet book, he also presents what to “eat” and how to solve the problems.

Unfortunately, he wanders off at the end into some ethical prescriptions. I suspect most readers will be with me in thanking him for the good, useful tips and techniques on controlling our info flow, and forgive him his excesses.

Honestly, he could have done the whole thing without the food/obesity/diet conceit. His main point include that there is no such thing as information overload. Rather, most of us are not aware of how information that intrudes on us or we seek controls us, from email to cable TV to opinion from those we already agree with.

As a remedy, he offers a plea for conscious consumption. That includes extremely useful methods for doing so. He specifies sites and applications, as well as philosophical decisions that will return the control back to us. That middle part of the book is worth its price and time.

If you are like most of us and fairly well versed in dieting, including Atkins, you may snort at the first third of the book. He is so fond of his metaphor of information as mind food, that he makes risible comparisons. For example, he notes that neither William Banting nor Robert Atkins’ advice “solved” obesity, and that he is chubby himself, but he doesn’t follow their advice. Eh?

Set that aside and if you are so inclined, skip the first section. The real, if you pardon, meat is in the middle. You feel overwhelmed by information and entertainment intruding all day, every day. What do you do?

Johnson has both general and specific fixes, including apps to help. His related website (informationdiet.com) has links to the resources he recommends, and additional ones. These include rescuetime.com to record honestly how you spend you computer day (and recommend efficiencies), sanebox.com to winnow wasteful email automatically into folders, and even readability.com to strip website articles of ads and other distractions.

He also devotes several pages to a methodology for increasing your attention span and desk productivity. It’s well worth reading and implementing. The man loves is metaphors and compares this to the walk-run system distance runners use to increase their exertion periods and reduce the rest ones. It is quite workable and for many like worth the time and expense of the book.

To use Johnson’s lingo, The Information Diet is like a sandwich. The white bread is on the outside and the real meat in the middle. There’s a lot to sustain you inside.

The Information Diet
A Case for Conscious Consumption
By Clay A. Johnson
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Released: December 2011
Pages: 160

Ebook: $19.99 list
Print: $22.99 list
Print & Ebook: $25.29 list

O’Reilly: http://oreil.ly/LOTxT0
Amazon: http://amzn.to/LOSKl9

It’s likely that when he hears low-carb, he’ll react with the litany of provably false slams. It’s water weight that will come right back on, it’ll clog your vessels with fat and plaque, and you can’t sustain that loss, no one does. My case has been continual week-to-week loss of fat and pounds; if there were water loss/regain, it disappeared into the non-stop and net.

I did my research and continue to tweak and added knowledge that he doesn’t have though. The trick of course is no trick at all. It requires that overworked phrase lifestyle change.

I snort severally. That term lifestyle does terrific work. The anti-LGBT folk love to call homosexuality a lifestyle, so they can pretend that disdain and discrimination are not those at all. However, food choices certainly can be.

Fortunately, as the main cook and shopper around here, I have more than a one-man vote. I stock the pantry, fridge and food bowls.

My research has resulted in a new mini-library in that process. My low-carb books, printouts and PDF files almost all come with recipes as well.

Unfortunately for us low-carb converts, many of those dish and meal maps don’t excite us. Many of the docs and nutritionists who developed them tried sincerely, but seem to have been more concerned with paralleling their guidelines rather than pleasing the mouths, eyes and noses of the new lifestyle followers. I can project what these recipes’ output will be like from reading their ingredients and preparation steps. Many lack sensuality and attention to savor (a.k.a. sapidity).

I’m  confident that I can augment those to please me and my family and guests. I cook to please.

Meanwhile, I’m fine-tuning my planned food lifestyle as I add more carbs from the base level. I’ll report on both what I try in carb/fat/protein percentages/grams, and how I tweak those from the scale and body-fat analysis as I get into it. There are bound to be changes.

This series includes:

Call it Lifestyle on the intellectual and emotional commitment to low-carb
Watching the Struggle on my grandmothers diet woes
Wrestling with Fat on overcoming fear of dietary fats
Hunger? do you starve on a low-carb diet?
Low-Carb Eats on what’s on the menu in the regimen
How Much of What Food on calories-in/calories-out cliché
Dr. Cadaver on mindless trust in group averages
Who’s Counting on body fast v. weight
Part 1 on pants don’t lie
Tags: harrumpher, fat, diet, low-carb, recipes

She was the eldest of a large family. The youngest was a sister, from their father’s remarriage after he became a widower. Mable’s angst was the worse for sister Anna’s slender build from a different mother.

Meanwhile, let it be known that I watched her in her 50s and 60s battle vigorously and without real success with body image and what books, doctors, family and women’s magazines told her she should weigh, as well as how much of what she should eat to get there. That had the extra nasty wrinkle of the insistence on height/weight charts, already disproved by insurance stats on longevity and health measures, but beloved by physicians.

I heard the scale whirr every morning. She had maybe two feet of diet and nutrition books on one shelf. Many were by the naturopath and chiropractor Gayelord Hauser. He straddled wise and foolish. He advocated natural foods, eschewing white sugar and white flour. Good enough, but he pitched his brand of blackstrap molasses as a kind of panacea, preached absurdly low caloric intake, and in effect expected everyone to thrive on what he did. In fact, he was a high-metabolic-rate ectomorph who wowed his celebrity friends like Greta Garbo with his wit as well as trim physique.

For Mable, the ideals were unworkable. 900 calories a day left her constantly hungry and often weak. She went for Hollywood Bread and another brand I recall as Lite Diet; both had small, very thin slices with few calories, maybe 45? The unamusing joke here is that she was the best baker I’ve ever known. Her pies, cobblers and cakes were superb and treasured by all who knew her. She baked great whole wheat and rye breads in which we delighted. There she was, starving with napkin-thing slices of tasteless junk in her effort to slim.

Sometimes she obviously failed. She was never a porker and her diet breaks did not mean she needed bigger dresses.

Instead, she simply had to eat more to be healthy. Rather than accept that and realize Hauser and the others she trusted were wrong, she snuck. She was not a pantry stuffer, scoffing out of sight. Rather, when she just couldn’t stand her hunger, she’d join us all at the dinner table, as we did each evening. Of course, as family, we had the serving dishes in the middle of the table. Mable would bring a plate with a napkin covering it.

It was sad and fooled no one. She’d tucked more protein under there. She’d stick a fork under the napkin and eat the few extra bites that let her go onto breakfast and another day of food struggles.

We were then as I remain, a straight-ahead, candid family. We would rather she had felt comfortable eating what she needed in plain sight. Yet, our candor did not include calling her on this emotional issue.

It was years later as I trimmed down successfully with Stillman that I reconsidered her struggles and body-image issues. She was large and muscular. She needed more to survive than scrawny folk. She’d never have the body type or metabolism of Hauser or starlets he accompanied. She couldn’t even become like her sister-by-the-second-mother Anna.

Yeah, it’s bad that most medical types are pretty ignorant about nutrition. It’s worse that so many rely on the easy, lazy formulae that fail most of us.

For me, I’m working on my own nutrition plan, regardless of the bad advice from doctors, nurses and a nutritionist. It’s a fair amount of work and requires iterative testing of calories/carbs/protein/fat with my scale and body-fat measurements. That’s still a lot easier intellectually, emotionally and physically than what my grandmother did for those many years. And as a big bonus, I’m not starving myself.

This series includes:

Call it Lifestyle on the intellectual and emotional commitment to low-carb
Watching the Struggle on my grandmothers diet woes
Wrestling with Fat on overcoming fear of dietary fats
Hunger? do you starve on a low-carb diet?
Low-Carb Eats on what’s on the menu in the regimen
How Much of What Food on calories-in/calories-out cliché
Dr. Cadaver on mindless trust in group averages
Who’s Counting on body fast v. weight
Part 1 on pants don’t lie

Tags: harrumpher, dieting, grandmother, Hauser

After many thousands of pages of reading, plus my own science experiment of myself, I know that’s crazy, lazy talk. Docs and even nutritionists as groups love the easy and formulaic. Nearly all say just consume more calories than you burn up and you’ll lose weight. Minimize fat intake to lose body fat.

Despite all I’ve learned, part of me clings to the unproven and unprovable claim that fat is bad, bad, bad.

Meanwhile, I’ve been on a low-carb, medium fat diet, keyed off of Atkins. Now I’m at the point of refinement.

My CrossTrainer program estimates protein/fat/carb percentages for low-carb eating. To keep this working long term, I need to settle on percentages that work best for me. As in two posts ago in this series, I add complex carbs slowly (about 5 grams per day per week) and measuring weight and body fat weekly, an iterative and personally scientific system. Thank myself very much.

Now’s the time to own up to that emotional block. I’ve minimized fats for so long that I am habituated. Looking at cheese, oil, butter, cream makes me uneasy.

My cure appears to be in the Volek and Phinney The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living. It is geekier than the Atkins books, but less research oriented and intellectually demanding than Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories. Instead, it both narrows ad expands on the others. The authors are researchers as well as a physician/dietitian duo. They have even converted to low carb. After heaping on the body chemistry and internal workings related to food and exercise in their book, they are specific about what to eat.

That is, unlike the typical formulae for fat/weighty control and maintenance, they acknowledge the wide range of metabolisms and body functions. They point readers to the right starting points and augment that with some decent and sensual recipes.

For me, the detailed discussions of how we use fats and which ones to add in what quantity is well worth slogging through the research. I suppose one could skim or skip those parts, but, hell, they’re over half the book. Plus, I need to be totally convinced to snuff out my emotional issue.

I’m going to up my fat intake to keep make this low-carb thingummy integral, but I’m doing it carefully. I’ll report back on what I decide and how that works.

This series includes:

Call it Lifestyle on the intellectual and emotional commitment to low-carb
Watching the Struggle on my grandmothers diet woes
Wrestling with Fat on overcoming fear of dietary fats
Hunger? do you starve on a low-carb diet?
Low-Carb Eats on what’s on the menu in the regimen
How Much of What Food on calories-in/calories-out cliché
Dr. Cadaver on mindless trust in group averages
Who’s Counting on body fast v. weight
Part 1 on pants don’t lie

Tags: harrumpher, fat, diet, exercise, Taubes, low-carb, Atkins, Volek, Phinney

Note that this is an ArtsEmerson show at the Paramount and runs through May 20th. Hie thee. Maestro: The Art of Leonard Bernstein is far better done and more memorable than any play you’re likely to see this year or any musical with women wearing spangles and rhinestones.

At its most basic, this show is a chronological biography. Badly written and performed, that could surely be tedious. This is riveting. No one coughed or rustled papers.

Note too that Felder is creating a career out of these musician shows. Following Bernstein, he comes on with black hair starting May 30th as George Gershwin. Previously, he’s been Chopin and Beethoven. He takes his shows on the road and somehow maintains his energy with one or two a day and transitioning among characters and musical repertoires.

And music…

Felder plays and sings, the former stronger than the latter, but certainly in the role of conductor/composer, his voice is fine and does not distract from the story. He plays enough Beethoven, Wagner. Copeland, a few others, plus parts of his own work. Intriguing is his early efforts and parts of his major works. Yet an apt leitmotif that does a fair job of tying his story together are a couple of songs from West Side Story, Somewhere and Maria.

Key tensions in the tale start with his unapproving, gruff father. Over his objections, Bernstein pays for his own piano lessons, studies with several leading mentors, and makes a seeming success of it all. Underlying are problems most of us who saw him conduct or perform and explain on TV forgot or did not know. There’s his finding, marrying and having three children with Felicia, his professed great love. Meanwhile, he longed to be known as a composer, to be among the greats in this country and historically. Along the way, he had homosexual affairs, including one for whom he left his wife for a few years. He returned and nursed her as she died of cancer.

A long, pivotal scene near the end has him beseeching the audience to sing any of his arias or recall even a few bars of his serious work. He knows no one can and in the end seems to accept begrudgingly that West Side Story will be his piece by which people recall him.

The show carries the biography from childhood to death surprisingly smoothly. Felder stays in character, or characters, as he voices the father, mother, various mentors and more. This artificial cast of characters allows for development and aging and struggles one-man shows tend to lack.

He also manages to deal candidly with issues, such as the gay affairs, without becoming salacious or silly.

The show had no pauses, no awkward or forced segments, and nothing contrived. It is brilliantly written. The steady rhythm of intense performance performance and then casual conversation provided great focus and framed each example of development memorably. Felder was more than capable at the piano and the musical selections illustrated both how Bernstein progressed, and regressed, professionally, and supported the thesis of a tormented would-be great composer.

Felder’s view seems to be, as the program reads, that it is too soon after Bernstein’s life and death to judge his oeuvre. His superb version of the life does not judge either. I left the Paramount with a much fuller and more personal sense of the musician and person. Again, this show brought me to my feet.

Tags: harrumpher, Felder, Bernstein, Maestro, ArtsEmerson

Those seeming death marches featured deprivation. Feeling hungry to ravenous seemed like an affirmation of will, of virtue. Pounds disappeared, at the cost of feeling self-punished. I could hardly wait to reach a target weight and stop that silliness.

In contrast, nearly all the low-carb versions I’ve seen and one I’ve adapted for myself go for sustainable eating patterns. Unlike just-eat-fewer-calories-than-your-body-needs, eat-right-foods-until-you’re-comfortable is, as the newer cliché goes, a plan. There’s no rush to escape.

A fundamental principle in Atkins or Duke or so many other low-carb regimens is worrying far less about calories, and instead counting carbs. Have four, six, even eight ounces of fish or meat for lunch or dinner. That of course depends on your size and activity level of the day. Do without the bread, potatoes, rice and other starches. Have a cup or two of greens and other low-carb veggies.

I confess that the veggie part is easier for me than some who grew up food picky. I worked with my grandfather in his gigantic gardens for 11 summers. Asparagus, lettuce, squash, kale, string beans, cabbage, peppers and on and on were in my hands and on the table shortly after picking. We ate what we got to the table and it was all damned good.

Those who didn’t grow up with an abundance of fresh vegetables or got mushy ones from cans might have a problem. For us, my grandmother froze and jarred many hundreds of pounds of them for winter and spring.

If you’re considering low-carb, keep the key concept in mind that you won’t go hungry. If you’re masochist, you can always stick with the modified starvation plan so popular in medical circles.

This series includes:

Call it Lifestyle on the intellectual and emotional commitment to low-carb
Watching the Struggle on my grandmothers diet woes
Wrestling with Fat on overcoming fear of dietary fats
Hunger? do you starve on a low-carb diet?
Low-Carb Eats on what’s on the menu in the regimen
How Much of What Food on calories-in/calories-out cliché
Dr. Cadaver on mindless trust in group averages
Who’s Counting on body fast v. weight
Part 1 on pants don’t lie
Tags: harrumpher, fat, diet, low-carb, Atkins

After typical and near total lameness from doctors and a nutritionist, I applied my fastidious nature and research experience to the task for me. For the impatient who need to gather essential information, I’d advise Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories or even his somewhat simplified version Why We Get Fat. After hitting libraries and online sources, mostly medical and scientific, I found that Good Calories included the punchlines of nearly every solid work I found on my own, plus much more. I could have started there, but likely would not have felt comfortable until I confirmed things.

On the no-no side, I can’t stress enough that for me, the diet clichés simply don’t work:

• WRONG. Everything in moderation is ideal.
• WRONG. Low fat and high complex carbohydrates are the key.
• WRONG. Consumer fewer calories than your estimated expenditures and all will be well.

Despite my assiduous devotion to those medical platitudes, my fat and weight crept up. The simpleminded docs, nurses and nutritionist could only conclude that I and my two nutrition/exercise programs were lying and given bad data. Their assertions just had to be accurate!

Yet, truth be told, I am like many adults who do not fit those silly saws. In my particular case, I share much physical history with others I know and read about. For example, several times, I have lost more than 10% of my body weight and fat. That turns down your metabolism substantially, making losing and maintaining weight/fat harder…likely forever. Also, aging does much the same. Moreover, I am an almost pure mesomorph, tending to broad shoulders and large muscle mass top and bottom. I have an efficient metabolism, which means exercise burns up less than the gym machines measure and software estimate. I see from various research that many of us end up switching to slow-twitch muscles after such body changes, which also means greater efficiency in exercise. Drat.

A non-scientist, the late Robert Atkins has a keen chapter in Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution that covers other reasons for metabolic resistance, as it’s known. Even staid old calories-in/calories-out folk like the Mayo Clinic report that some drugs, like beta blockers, can decrease metabolic rate by up to 13% (huge when you want to lose or control). Likewise, hormones, anti-depressants, anti-arthritis, steroids and on and on can hose metabolism. In the tablet and pill-happy medical environment we inhabit, that’s a big deal.

Marketing Opportunity: In a little side rant, I would pay for a smart, learning diet program. My mother and niece also recorded their nutrition and exercise for years. We’re all honest and thorough; it would have done us no good to cheat. We found the calories-in/calories out to be near worthless for us. There’s likely a huge market for a piece of software that follows your intake and expenditure, and correlates them with your ongoing weight and body-fat measurements. Then it would tweak what is actually happening in your unique system. It would rationalize the basal metabolism rate and provide meaningful measures of exercise expenditures for you.

My mouth

Draw your own conclusions when you read about nutrition. I came to low-carb and started on it. I’m losing fat and weight at a decent clip and intend to keep it up and eventually move simply into maintenance. A big plus on the far end is that this appeals to my scientific bent. I can tweak my diet in ways neither my medical sorts or the software have been able to do.

The short of it is for me, I modified the Atkins. I just don’t want to consume the levels of fat he suggested. I’ve been leaning low-fat for a long time and moved up to moderate amounts. I’ve nearly eliminated fruit, have not consumed bread in six weeks, nor even allegedly healthy starches like brown rice. I eat fish, meat, eggs, cheeses, olive oil, mayonnaise, and low-carb veggies. I rarely touch a beer, instead have a bourbon or malt whiskey (carb-free) or dry wine (low-carb).

Fortunately, over the years, I have come to care less and less for sweets. I do like a piece of dark chocolate, but can ignore a full cookie jar, ice cream in the freezer, or a restaurant’s dessert menu. I’m a very good break baker and have not come to terms with what I’ll do to ease back into small amounts down the line.

There are several popular low-carb variations. I suspect any of them would be a major change for most of us, and would do what I want done. As far as my body, I’ve been sold and re-sold defective goods in health comes from high-complex carbs and low fat. It doesn’t work for Mike.

Instead, I have increased my daily calories substantially from about 1100 to about 1500. I’m trimming down. My pants are looser (remember, pants don’t lie!). I’m sleeping better. I’m flat out happier. I eat as much as I want of protein, veggies and fat, never feeling hungry or deprived.

As a serious cook, I see the challenges here. Each low-carb diet book has its recipes, but many are not sensual and amusing enough for me. I’ll work on that.

Yet a diet starting the day with a cheese omelet or scrambled eggs with sausage or no-carb ham, plus celery, salad or other low-carb green is a satisfying start. To my point of fat, most low-carb book would use all whole eggs. Instead, I use one egg and two or three whites, with a teaspoon or so of olive oil in the pan. I’m getting the fat, but maybe half of what an Atkins meal calls for. Again, this is working for me in weight and body-fat drops week after week. I remain emotionally comfortable with the amount of fat I consume too, even if I might be losing faster with more fat.

That Science

To my call for a smart, heuristic diet software package, a very appealing aspect of switching to low carbs is the anticipation of finding a personal plan in the end. In Atkins for example, you start out with severe carb restrictions, under 20 grams a day. You slowly up it as you switch to on-going loss, like an average of five more grams a week.

That turned out to be not all that hard in practice. For years, I’ve used CrossTrainer to record all I eat and exercise; it can be set to low-carb so that it plainly displays running counts as well as what’s in any given food before you add it. There are many others, in fact Lockergnome god Chris Pirillo tested buckets of them and swears by CalorieKing. His point and mine, of course, is to use it and record every damned morsel, sip and step. Let’s be adult about this.

The Atkins operation also wants to own you. It will send a free get-started package for you email address as well as give you a wide variety of free online tools. It wants to sell you books and its energy bars and such. The package they mail includes a nifty pocket-sized carb counter that suits most foods…and takes the excuse out of traveling or restaurants.

So assuming I keep this up and get back to my svelte self, the scientific tweaking comes into play. While the RDA for carbs is 300 grams a day, that certainly won’t work for me. The idea is to keep counting, keep increasing, keep weighing/measuring body fat. When a specific level, say 60 a day or 110 or whatever, shows up a week or two going the wrong way, I need to go back down.

I am anal retentive enough that weighing and using the body-fat machine (takes about 30 seconds) weekly is fine, as is continuing to track carbs, and for no particular reason it seems, calories, daily is OK too. I keep a notebook for when I travel and know enough about what to eat and not that I’m close without the running totals. That’s me and others might have to use a smartphone or laptop with an online app.

This series includes:

Call it Lifestyle on the intellectual and emotional commitment to low-carb
Watching the Struggle on my grandmothers diet woes
Wrestling with Fat on overcoming fear of dietary fats
Hunger? do you starve on a low-carb diet?
Low-Carb Eats on what’s on the menu in the regimen
How Much of What Food on calories-in/calories-out cliché
Dr. Cadaver on mindless trust in group averages
Who’s Counting on body fast v. weight
Part 1 on pants don’t lie
Tags: harrumpher, fat, diet, exercise, Taubes, low-carb, Atkins, Pirillo