OSG brought us some newspaper, with which we covered the big weed/dirt/lawn scrapings pile and have poured on mulch and water…it’s about 8′ wide and about 20 feet long, and above knee high. This was a good morning’s work…before work. Back to the keyboard. At least that weed-zone is handled until next year, at which time we hope it will just be a nice pile of useable good dirt.
Bumblebees have occupied one of the piles: I’m thinking of wet-newspapering and mulching that, in the theory the bees can find their way out, but we’ll have it mulched. I don’t want to harm them, but I don’t want them to harm us, either. Joe? got a recommendation: smoke is illegal in town!
The diet is doing well: the plan is: two weeks of Induction, meaning 20 grams of carb a day or less, as much meat, cheese, egg, etc as we want, with vitamin and mineral supplements, no wine, no coffee: I cheated and had three cups while doing heavy labor, then back to water. Then three and a half months of diet, meaning just over 20 grams of carb a day. Then a month of back to eating what we want. Repeat until weight is where it needs to be. We’ll be healthier and happier when we’ve shed 40 pounds each, and we’ve already seen a little positive result. The last time we tried this diet we failed, but we both were ‘off’ in thyroid, and are now under close monitoring by an endocrinologist, with tests due this month, so we will, I hope, see a more normal result and actually be able to drop weight. We did a massive weight loss back in 2004 or 5, dropped 40, then Jane dropped 10 more. Then she gained 10 back; I’ve hovered right where I’ve been for 5 years, despite dieting too much, so we’ve both got a new set-point 40 pound lower than it used to be; but couldn’t get beyond that.
Now we’ve got the endocrinologist’s help, and we’re going to be sensible. If we can each lose 40, even 30, from where we are, we will be back in fighting trim, so to speak, and that’s much nicer on the joints and back, not to mention general system issues. Wish us luck. In two weeks we’re going to be real tired of meat and eggs and ready for a tortilla, even a small potato.
I find low fat popcorn a good way to binge on carbs without taking in much in calories. Available by the case at Costco, speaking of them.
Popcorn, or any whole grain if you can find it without sugar.
I tell you what’s scary is to go to a grocery when you’re on Atkins. In the first 2 weeks, you can have anything in the meat department and, over in dairy, you can have any aged yellow cheese, and eggs. But that’s a tiny part of the store. Envision the rest of the store as selling only carbohydrates, and that includes most of the frozen foods.
There are some goshawful surprises:
1)low-fat cottage cheese is killer. They stuff it with carbs. Use the real thing.
2) Most all the diet-drinks use aspartame or saccharine: off-limits. They trigger the same response as sugar. You can use anything with Splenda, but very few drinks but Arizona use it, because it’s pricey.
3)the whole rest of the store is off-limits, even coffee and tea. If you start viewing those aisles of cereal in terms of their components, you see barrels of flour and sugar at every turn.
4) most prepared food is loaded with filler, read, carbohydrate. If you’re going to sin, best have a can of beans or a small baked potato—12 carbs, and you can have everything that goes on it. Since your daily allotment of carbs is 20 grams or a bit more, you can have your loaded potato, and a small serving of green beans. Or salad. With a piece of steak. But the salad dressing is absolutely loaded with carbs. Sugar. Tons of it. Look at that aisle and you see a few veggie-bins, some dairy, a few barrels of oil and many barrels of carbohydrates in the form of sugars or thickeners. Salad is one of America’s silliest dietary recourses: you starve yourself on lettuce and celery (celery has WAY too much sodium to be nice)…and you pour on the equivalent of 2-3 spoonfuls of jam and call it dieting and healthy for you. Nope. Not at that rate.
The good news is that both of us are now ‘down’ a little in weight.
I got a great recipe from my MiL for an unusual but wicked tasty Caesar dressing:
Pulverize 1 clove of garlic; if you feel like crushing it, then mincing the resulting smash, that’s good. Put in a bowl with 1/2 tsp coarse salt and 1 tsp mustard powder. Mash together until you get a lumpy uniformly colored blend. Squeeze the juice of 1 lemon into the bowl, and add a scant 1/4 cup olive oil. Blend again, then add 1 tbs. mayonnaise. You now have a mostly carb free dressing that is wonderful on Romaine lettuce, just toss in a few tbs. of shredded Parmesan or Romano, and you’re good to go! It also can be topped with your choice of shredded chicken, shrimp, slivers of steak, almost any meat. Tonight I had the ultimate indulgence: Caesar salad topped with ahi poke (marinated fresh raw tuna). I can feel Ysabel’s baleful stare from here.
Oh, you surely can. She’d go for that and anything that smelled of it! 😉
And THANK you for that recipe. Totally legal, and while we react very badly to onion, we can have a little garlic—not garlic powder: we’re deathly allergic to the stabilizer in it—but real garlic, yes.
CJ, how long do you want to wait for the bumblebees to get out of there? The reason I ask is that only the queen overwinters and she might not stay in that spot. A summer hive isn’t the same as a winter place, and being alone, she’s going to be looking for a warm spot to hibernate over the winter. Smoke is illegal in Spokane? I guess the churches are exempt with their censers. I’m trying to think how you could get them to leave, but if they’ve got any brood in there, they’re not going to want to leave and they’ll fight hard to defend the brood. But, because the season is winding down, it’s doubtful she’s laid any more eggs, and so any brood would have been already emerged as adult workers. No smoke……hmmm….I know you don’t want to start spraying, especially since that would contaminate the mulch. As far as not hurting them, I don’t see any way around it unless you just wait until it gets cold and the workers all die off. Then I’d close up any holes, there won’t be any honey, and I don’t think they make wax, but I could be mistaken on the wax. Messing with bumblebees is a lot worse than honey bees, because the bumblebees can sting multiple times, injecting venom with each sting. I’ve found bumblebees to be rather peaceable critters, unless you run over their hive with a lawn tractor, or a brush hog.
Why is coffee off limits? If you drink it black or with Splenda, there’s no carb overload. As far as salad dressing, I never use it, I ask for lemon wedges instead, and use the juice as my dressing. I get the tang that I would from vinegar (I don’t care for it), but none of the fat and sugars from creamy dressings (yuck!).
The induction phase (2 weeks) of Atkins wants you drinking only water, and plenty of it. Glug. I hates it!
Well, we can’t burn anything in the city. But I’d thought maybe if I just covered it all with newspaper, wet that, threw mulch on it, that I’d accomplish my mission of covering that pile with mulch and the bees could chew their way out and go about their bee-business unharmed.
You can do that, and I think it’ll work just fine. Putting newspaper over the mulch pile and wetting it won’t hurt the bumblebees at all. I’m sorry, I misunderstood your question.
My recommendation would be to do it in the early morning or later on in the evening, when the foragers are back in the hive, and when they get ready to fly out, they’ll have to chew, but that’s not that hard for them, they can burrow.
I’m such a softie, but I will not kill living things if I can possibly avoid it. Doesn’t make me a vegetarian…at least what we eat gets our help reproducing, and I’m allergic to so many veggies I couldn’t live as a vegetarian…but I really feel sympathy for the poor bees, who have enough to cope with.
I’m getting over my reluctance to kill living things. I live next to an open area, and am learning the vital importance of early control on gophers and ground squirrels. I had some ground squirrels move into the yard, in gopher burrows where I had removed the inhabitants, and I thought “what’s the worst thing that can happen?” That would be holes big enough for my cat to go down, under my fruit trees. And ground that is soft enough from tunnels that I worry about my dogs’ legs. And, unfortunately, the only way to really deal with the squirrels out here is to use poison (and risk poisoning other, beneficial, critters), or to live trap and deal with disposing of the animal yourself. And, having dealt with very angry trapped squirrels, never let anyone tell you “it’s an herbivore… let’s go pet it”!
When your home and critters are threatened, absolutely. Prairie dogs and gophers were a threat to the horses I loved when I was a kid—getting the pasture clear was essential. I mourned the little blighters, and was terribly sorry, but I wouldn’t see a horse I loved killed because of them.
Ever thought of adding a terrier to your greyhounds? The digging might be a disturbance initially, but aren’t they bred for exactly this sort of hunting?
My parents have had ground squirrels in their yard and house for several years. They’d used poison before, but this year my dad tried something else. A friend told him that one could set out a 5-gal. bucket filled about halfway with water and sunflower seeds sprinkled atop the water as a trap. It works, very well. Dad bagged over 20 this spring and summer. He took the carcasses to the backyard and left them just beyond the treeline, where they’ve been removed within 24 hours. One hopes the owls and such have had a better diet lately. This gets rid of the “pest” without passing toxic chemicals into the ecosystem, and supplements local carnivore diets at the same time.
The bees will chew though a paper block in a reasonable length of time.
You can use a paper wad to close a hive for transport which gives you a
chance to be bee free for awhile but lets them clear it themselves.
A soggy news paper won’t be anything more than a temporary barrier.
If you’re worried just make the paper coverage thinner over their entrance
area. Unlike the honeybee the Bumble is highly adaptable and usually
makes a good neighbor. The Italian honeybee needs quite a bit of room
and you can get stung by being in the flightpath between the hive and
what they are collecting from. It’s not malice, they just react to
crashing into something they didn’t expect to be there.
I’m surprised dry beans are off limits, boiled up with chunked up
bacon they make a good solid meal which tastes pretty good without
any other seasonings. It’s pretty high in proteins as well. I’d
think that you haven’t been on a changed diet long enough to see
any real effects from it as yet. I tend to think that what makes
you feel good is usually the right diet as long as you are moderate
in intake and avoid the obviously awful for you (anything in a
package in a modern supermarket). Reading the labels give you
enough horrors to contemplate you no longer need Stephen King…GRIN
Beans will be back on our diet as soon as we pass the induction phase, which is 2 weeks. One of our favorite dishes in winter is pinto beans heated up with jalapeno slices, topped with sharp cheddar and microwaved until the cheddar joins the bean-soup. That’ll warm you up after shoveling snow!
avoiding the modern supermarket would be so good for all of us! back to basics! some meat or fish, some vegetables (including herbs), some fruit, a little olive oil and pulses. we don’t need all that wheat and stuff! that’s what humans developed as an easier way to fill mouths than hunter gathering, but it was the worst move we ever made, as far as diet was concerned … and as for rubbish like ready made sauces and salad dressings …..
but, best of luck with the Atkins, I know it worked for you in the past! and probably is quite healthy in that you do sidestep all that carb glue and sugar …
I view carbs and fats as rather like fire and gasoline: you can have one OR the other safely in a reasonable time frame, but if you have both, your system is not going to be happy and you will get the bad effects of the fat.
I think historically people have had fats as a way to have the ‘full’ feeling, and carbs as a way to keep their own fat padding and their energy, but I think the amount of carbs we can eat on a ‘rich’ diet is just way over the top: the invention of refined sugars instead of honey (which was a rare treat in the day’s diet—NOT slathered on at every meal, as sugar is the stiffener in breakfast cereal, etc) sent us into carb frenzy: sugars, including fake sugars like Saccharin and Aspartame, send our bodies into a blood sugar spike, followed by ‘the hollows’, as the succeeding trough urges us we’re ‘hungry, hungry, hungry’. Which makes us eat still more. If you combine fats with that dose, you don’t get satiated: you just store the fat.
We had an interesting conversation with a native of Acoma Pueblo, which is a place with a very long, long memory. We spent quite a lot of time with him, as our guide up there. Now the residents, because of the change in diet by the advent of Europeans, are battling diabetes. Bigtime. Their old diet was beans, corn, squash, a very little meat. Likely honey and other such when they could find it. A lot of exercise: Acoma is a lot vertical. But add in refined sugars and what we do food-wise, and it was a disaster for them. Sugar-frosted flakes and alcohol were not their friend; and trying to undo that and go back to the old diet against the lure of television and sweet treats and fatty prepared foods—not easy.
Could Jane and I do that, you ask? No. We’re Europeans, and unfortunately, like more Europeans than know it, we’re mildly allergic to every New World plant but squash and beans. While we like both squash and beans, it lacks a certain variety, nor do we climb Acoma heights every day. And what do Europeans do with squash? We add butter and sugar to the recipe. And what do we do with beans? We add fat salt pork.
So…we at least try to apply what we know about human nutrition and get rid of what the carbs/fat combo piled on. Unfortunately both of us have metabolisms that really love carbs: we both tried the low fat method, and our hair went brittle, we suffered from cold, we still wanted a lot of food, and we still gained weight. On Atkins, our desire for food diminishes, we aren’t cold, our hair and skin are in good shape, and we lose weight, though slowly. I think to a great extent we are the children of our ancestors, and if we got rid of wheat (a middle-eastern plant) and stuck to oats and barley as grains, we might fare better. I know we’re pretty happy when we use our daily carb allotment in a bowl of oats in the morning. 😉 But we’re not at that stage of the diet yet.
I empathize with the diet. I am dieting and working out a lot while I am TDY, and the first 10 lbs came off easy, now I hit the plateau and its stopped dropping. Everyone has a different idea on how to burn calories, whether aerobic or fat burn and what to eat, or if cutting too many calories is going to have the oppesite result in the short term. Seems like it ought to be easy but the human body is such a complex machine. Eat fewer calories and burn more should loose weight, at least you would think that’s how it works. I think in the long run it does, but its very annoying.
I am wishing you success in your diets!
“…we both tried the low fat method, and our hair went brittle…”
I believe that would be lack of protein. I go very low calorie, low fat, but I make sure I get 50g of protein daily–often significantly more. Hair is protein, after all.
No, we were eating chicken. Lots of chicken and beans. And we actually gained weight like crazy, I forgot to add. I think people have more than different faces and blood types: we have different metabolisms.
Certainly true about the different metabolisms. I can’t eat a rational portion of beans, any more than most carbs, without an unrealistic amount of willpower.
You know, you guys need a Trader Joe’s. Have you considered joining the lobby for one? (Google “Trader Joe’s” Spokane.) They were thinking about it before the boom busted, and I’ve noticed they’re hiring a lot of management trainees recently.
Trader Joe’s look’s really interesting. We do have a couple of food stores that do high-end quality, plus a real good Mexican restaurant/to go/grocery, and an Oriental Grocery that I haven’t tried out yet. I’m looking for some shirataki noodles, veggie based and very low carb. I’d like to try them for edibility.
I’ve been unable to find any veggie food that hits my protein goals–or rather, my doctor’s protein goals.
Hm. It’s getting toward that time: since you’re now (excuse me) on Medicare, you might want to look at their HMOs. Co-pays are cheap, and you’ll want to ask your current doctor if she works with a Medicare HMO. You can always emergency dis-enroll to return to fee-for-service Medicare.