The Best of Life after Carbs

By Jim Anderson

Losing weight, gaining hope

"The first year, I lost more than 20% of my body weight without exercising or going hungry. It seemed like a miracle, but it was just science. The book shows how I did it, and why."

In 2011, Jim Anderson had a problem. It came in the form of fat around his mid-section. Many pounds of fat. His father's life had been cut short by type-2 diabetes and heart-disease, and Jim desperately wanted to avoid the same fate. So he set out to make a change.

He reduced the carbohydrates in his diet, and soon realized the approach was the right one for him. "It wasn't just that I lost weight. I also felt good doing it. I felt I could eat low-carb forever."

Jim began living his life after carbs. Soon, he was blogging about it on his web site LifeAfterCarbs.com, entertaining and informing readers from around the world. In this book, based on his popular blog, Jim details what he has learned over the years about starting and staying on a low-carb, high-fat diet. 

As tens of thousands of blog readers have discovered, Jim Anderson is a real person eating (mostly) real food. The Best of Life after Carbs, at once inspiring and amusing, shows what he did and why. It's an accurate portrait of one dieter's challenges and triumphs on the road to a healthier weight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sequitur Publishing
• Release date: Aug 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386452577

Jim Anderson

James E. (Jim) Anderson is a writer, blogger, and podcaster living in the Great Lakes region of the United States. He blogs about eating a healthy ketogenic diet at lifeaftercarbs.com. His podcast The Lowcarb Nugget can be found on Apple Podcsts, Google Play Music, and other distribution sites.

Book preview

The Best of Life after Carbs

by

Jim Anderson

Sequitur Publishing

Copyright 2017 James E. Anderson

All Rights Reserved

Table of Contents

Title Page

Author’s Note

Losing weight, gaining hope

Five lessons for eating low-carb

What is a low-carb diet?

A real person eating (mostly) real food

A low-carb dieter’s blood test results

Low-carb diets and dental health

Loathsome, tiresome exercise

Calculating the fat burning quotient

The ups and downs of weighing in

Tips for eating out low-carb

Chowing down low-carb style at Red Robin

Eating low-carb at Taco Bell

Going nuts on a low-carb diet

Low-carb road-trip eating

Pasty cravings

Low-carb eating at parties and events

A windy, low-carb weekend in Chicago

Perfect low-carb pancakes

Avocado in the morning

Great low-carb foods: salmon and sardines

No-filler salmon patties

Italian green bean salad

Almonds, avocados, and macadamias

Pecans: an LCHF powerhouse

Seeds: sunflower, flax and chia

Junk food smack-down: pork rinds vs. potato chips

Berries in heavy cream

Dark chocolate to the rescue!

Coffee = Life = Coffee

No hot dogs here

Metabolism as fate?

Connect with Jim Anderson

Disclaimer

References

Author’s Note

The chapters in this book are based on articles that I originally wrote for my blog, Life After Carbs, between 2011 and 2017.

I have made minor changes, updates, and corrections, but have tried to retain the flavor and attitude of the original work, even if it meant retaining a few passages more suited to a blog than a book or turned awkward by the passing years.

Jim Anderson

Losing weight, gaining hope

Like many people, I long struggled with my weight.

For years, the struggle was completely one-side. The excess fat was winning, especially the excess fat around my mid-section – the worst possible place for fat to win. According to the National Institutes of Health, men with a waist circumference greater than 40 inches have a progressively increasing risk of developing heart disease and type-2 diabetes. For women, it’s a waist circumference greater than 35 inches. (NIH Assessing)

By the first months of 2011, I had out-grown my waist-size 44 pants (except for a few pairs with very stretchy waist bands) and graduated to waist-size 46.

Up to that point, at 6-2, I had always carried my extra pounds well, but now my bulging stomach was obvious. It looked like I had a basketball under my shirt.

Technically speaking, I was obese, as many Americans are. Going by body mass index (BMI), I would need to lose more than 30 pounds just to be re-classified as over-weight.

I had little hope of losing three pounds, let alone 30 pounds or more.

Even my age was against me. At 59, I couldn’t count on a youthful metabolism to bail me out. I was sedentary (which hasn’t changed much). I had no huge reserves of will-power. Things looked bleak.

Then, in early March 2011, I read a book that changed my eating habits, and my life.

As a college writing teacher, I’ve always believed (or wanted to believe) that books possess that power, but I’ve rarely experienced it myself. Yes, books have inspired me, moved me, made me laugh, and maybe even kept me sane at the low points of my life, but only one has caused me to lose over 50 pounds and eight inches around my middle.

That book by Gary Taubes is Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It (Taubes Why).

Taubes examines the history of research into weight-gain, and rejects the popular theory that it’s all a matter of calories in/ calories out. Rather, he argues that we get fat because of a hormonal problem – in particular, the hormone insulin.

Here’s my thumbnail sketch of the process. Our bodies produce insulin to deal with the carbs we eat. As long as insulin is present in the blood, our bodies don’t burn their fat reserves. Excessive consumption of carbohydrates leads to a situation where insulin is almost always present. And so we get fat, and stay fat.

I won’t review the book here. It’s well known to those in the low-carb community, and if you are not yet part of that community, reading Why We Get Fat would be a good starting place for joining.

Upon reading that book and then several others, I started eating a low-carb diet and losing weight. I am still doing both. True, for a couple periods, I stopped paying much attention to my eating, and my weight slowly increased. While I still ate many fewer carbs on an average per day than most Americans, I was eating too many carbs for me – and for my waist-line.

I gained back some pounds, but I stayed well under my starting point, and my annual physical exams remained positive. And I was able to re-focus and start losing pounds again. I’m not perfect, but I know what works for me.

My doctor has told me more than once since 2011 that if all his patients made the changes I have, he would prescribe many fewer drugs. In fact, I take no prescription drugs. I can’t attribute that to my genes. By his late 50s, my father was taking medications for blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes. He ended up on insulin. He also underwent heart bypass surgery. He died at age 72 from a heart-attack. My mother, still going at age 90, has taken prescriptions for those same conditions.

I was edging toward prescriptions and problems before I changed my way of eating. Since then, my conventional markers for cardiovascular health have improved. My doctor has called me a wonder. I’d just call myself lucky for having discovered the benefits of low-carb, high-fat eating when I did.

I started my blog Life After Carbs in June 2011. It now has more than 200 pages and posts, many of which have been viewed (and I hope read) by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Recently, I started a related podcast, The Low Carb Nugget, available at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and other distribution sites.

There are many good people already writing about the low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) lifestyle, and publishing books, articles, and podcasts, too. Some are medical or dietary experts; others are concerned amateurs like me. (Also see the Disclaimer.)

One more voice can only help, and over the years I’ve tried my best to add something useful. I’m a quick learner, an analytic thinker, a critical thinker, and a rhetorician with much training and experience in parsing texts, especially those that seek to persuade or convince. Or to trick. Indeed, I have taught that kind of critical reading, writing and thinking to adults for thirty years.

On my blog and podcast, I keep watch on the mass media’s reporting of dietary issues, and I also examine the latest scientific reports in the field to see how well – from an intelligent lay-person’s perspective – their claims match their evidence. But mostly I focus on what I am eating, or not eating, and why.

Thanks for reading, good luck to you all, and