Plan Z Diet: To Carb or Low Carb That's the Plan Z Diet Question

To Carb or Low Carb That's the Plan Z Diet Question

By: Zola
Chief Dieter
Plan Z Diet

I heard it first from my father. He was sitting at the kitchen table one morning grousing to my mother about his breakfast. My mother had laid out the breakfast my dad’s doctor had recommended. My dad was complaining about what he was eating and why.

Sitting in front of my father was a bowl of Cornflakes. He didn’t want to eat them. He wanted his bacon and eggs back. My father was accustomed to two poached eggs and three slices of bacon. Toast and coffee. Cornflakes weren’t cutting it.

Doctors all over the US had told their patients the same thing. Cut the fat. That meant no more bacon or eggs. This was in the 1970’s when the recommendations coming out of the medical community totally took a new turn and professed that fat made you fat and fat clogged your arteries, so if you were smart, you’d cut the fat. So my dad did as he was ordered.

He also groused about how one decade they tell you to eat whole wheat bread. Then the next one they decide the new fortified white bread is best and eventually they went back the other way and now they are recommending whole wheat again. He wished they’d just make up their minds.

What my father was eating in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s would be considered a low carb diet. It was also a whole food diet. A whole food diet means eating fresh food; not things from a box that you find in the grocery aisles.

In the 1980’s Dr. Atkins came out with his version of a low carb diet and there are medical professionals today who still consider that not only a fad diet but a dangerous one.

Whether it’s Paleo, Atkins or a low carb diet by any other name, it’s being proven over and over again now that low carb is not dangerous. It’s actually healthy. It’s a lifestyle that you can adapt to and thrive.

My low carb Plan Z Diet lifestyle isn’t as restrictive as the original diet from Dr. Atkins. I did his diet in the 80’s. I felt horrible while I was on it. I felt like Jabba the Hutt eating all that bacon and eggs and cheese and high fat. It was just too much. I didn’t lose much weight and it came back with a vengeance when I went back to eating what the nutritionists told me to eat. That was a total failure. The Atkins organization of today is making changes to adapt to what they think the American public can tolerate in a low carb diet. I’m not sure what they are going toward is great, but they are making adjustments and promoting them.

Paleo is another diet style that’s low carb and criticized by many in the medical community. They also say it’s too difficult to do. How hard can it be to eat REAL food that you buy from a farmer’s market or a grocery store and cook it? Their point seems to be that Americans are so accustomed to eating on the go and out of a box, that they can’t adapt to cooking and eating real food. That’s not sustainable behavior they say. Really? People who care about the future of their health are now taking the time to cook and sit down to meals. That sounds like the 1960’s to me, when our family gathered around the dining table and ate as a family. We ate real food, too.

My father was 6’1” when I was a kid, and slim. He wore tailored suits and a bow tie to work every day. I was proud to watch him walk out to his car in the morning and drive off to work.

Then he switched to Cornflakes. He started to gain weight. Then he started eating candy. My father was never much of a dessert person before that. He became Type 2 diabetic in his later years. By the time he died he was so addicted to sugar that I saw him put a teaspoon of sugar across his bowl of Frosted Flakes. He had graduated from Cornflakes to adding sugar to the ultimate sugared flake; the frosted ones.

If you buy into the newest science that confirms that fat doesn’t make you fat, and fat doesn’t clog your arteries, you’ll lean toward a low carb diet. You’ll learn that your brain is powered by fat and that if you want your kid to be full and focused you’ll send him off to school with eggs and cheese in his belly. You’ll skip the orange juice and the toast.

Low carb will help you lose weight at first. Sometimes quickly on the front end of the process, and then it will taper. If you want to lose considerable weight quickly, you’ll do a combination of low fat and low carb. You’ll do it for short periods of time. Maybe 1 – 2 months at a time. Then you’ll maintain your new losses with a low carb lifestyle.

People who do low carb for the long haul don’t do it because they are constantly losing weight. They do it because they feel better.

Their health improves and the science now bears witness to the fact that this “old – and now new” lifestyle is proper if you want to live a long, healthy life. Eating like my father did before the Cornflakes will help you live a long time. His mother did it. She lived until 2 weeks before her 100th birthday. Yep. That was my grandmother. A low carb lifer.

For This Week's Featured recipe I've included a rockstar Plan Z Diet Lime Chicken perfect for rookie cooks.