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That's true that these products aren't bad in moderation, but we get
people here who are trying to eat them while on induction.  That just
isn't right -- you're not breaking your old habits if you're eating ice
cream.   Personally, I don't like milk, don't care if I ever eat bread
again, but I do like ice cream.  However, I can't buy Breyer's LC ice
cream, as 1/2 C per serving is not very much ice cream for me.  Ice cream
is a downfall of mine.  I do buy some pancake mix and fake syrup and don't
mind eating this from time to time, but I can also eat this and feel no
need to eat more, whereas I take a 1/2 Cup of ice cream and go, "That was
it?  You've got to be kidding!"

Ummm... why didn't you grow meat?  Or hunt?  We're growing chickens
and eggs now, plan to add rabbits in a month or so - I've got the nest
boxes built, but need to get off my a.s and build the "coop".

I'd like to do a dairy cow, and the annual beef calf as well, but it's
not practical here where we are now.  We only have around an acre,
including the gardens, and are surrounded by a real beef operation
with around 50 cattle.  I can't see that we could keep a dairy cow in
here even if there were enough land to support her, she'd be wanting
to join the herd and they are fenced in with only a single-strand of
electric (they get out semi-regularly as it is).

I *want* a cow very badly.  I like cows a lot, whereas I don't like
the chickens much.  They're pretty stupid and kinda nasty to each
other.

A calf raised from spring to fall and butchered young to save the work
and feed of overwintering is going to provide on average more than 3
lbs beef per day for a year.  Once we have the cow, we plan to do a
couple pigs as well, as they can be raised largely on the extra milk
plus pasture, just as the calf can be.  That's a whole heck of a lot
of meat, not even counting chickens and rabbits and hunting.

But we won't be doing the cows and pigs until we get our homestead.
The entire *point*, for us, is to never work corporate jobs again.
Granted, we both still code for corporate customers now (from home),
but won't be doing it then, as we won't have electricity for a few
years once we get out there given that clearing land, putting in
pastures, planting fruit and nut trees, building a home and a barn
will all take priority over building a home power station.

The low-carb bit is incidental to the plan, the primary plan is to
never, ever deal with pointy-haired people's politics again.  This
means producing everything we can ourselves as cash will be rare.  In
figuring our future budget, I see our biggest expense will be coffee.

I woke up several years ago, before I'd met hubby, to realize I worked
a job I hated to support a life I hated - and started thinking about
what I wanted for the future.  This was it for me.  Been planning for
about 5 years now.  Luckily, when I met and fell in love with Steve,
he had similar dreams.

We moved "halfway" there by moving to where we are now.  We did it
this way for a couple reasons, first being that we dreamt about this
for years but didn't *know* we'd like living in the country, so only
made a halfway commitment in case the reality didn't live up to the
dreams.  We live close enough to town that getting rid of the animals
and getting regular jobs would be easy here.  And we also figured
learning to provide for ourselves was a lot safer while still being in
easy distance to a grocery store - where we plan to buy land
eventually, we will likely not be able to get out all winter.  Doing
this now also means we're saving tons of money - our land will be paid
for with cash as soon as when we get it.  We're sort of in school for
our future life.

For us, it's a quality of life issue, enjoying the company of animals
and plants more than most people; building a chicken coop out of
pallets with my husband is way more fun than going to meetings.  Even
now, only "halfway" there, and still shopping at least weekly since we
don't have a home dairy yet, life is *majorly* improved over a few
years ago.  We spend less than a third than we did then and have *way*
more in our lives than when we had more money.

So far this year, I have only begun seeds for onions, savoy cabbage
and butterhead lettuce.  But our plans this year include storage
cabbage, bok choy, peas, beans, paste tomatoes, Branywine tomatoes,
several kidns of bell peppers, carrots, chard, mache, radichio,
rutabagas, pumpkin, zucchini, summer squash, winter squash, potatoes,
eggplant, sunflowers, shallots, leeks, corn, tetragonia, kale, mint
and several herbs.  We aren't doing fruit because we won't be here
more than another year or two, except some cantalope.  And we are not
doing nuts here for the same reason, though we'll plant lots of trees
on our land.  Some of that is pretty high-carb food, corn, cantalope
and potatoes not being induction food, but most of it is nice low-carb
food.

Manure is free for the hauling since we have the neighboring cow
operation and hubby bartered labor for straw.  So our raised beds were
all free to build.  We haven't started seed-saving yet, so I buy seed.
I spent $120 on seed this year, for what will produce around half of
our food for the year.

More importantly, it will provide half of my lesiure time too - cause
gardening is not "work" to me, I love it.  I used to rush home from my
corporate job to water the handful of tomatoes in my
postage-stamp-sized backyard, full of purchased amendments that I
hauled in - and had my morning coffee out there daily before heading
in to the corporat job.  Now my job is at my desk at home where I can
walk out into the garden anytime throughout the day... my recreation
is always there.  OK, right now the garden isn't doing much, there's
just the stuff in the cold frames out there.  But there's seedlings
all over my house and it warms the soul if not the body, to see green
things growing in February.

Winter is short now.  I don't finish harvesting and putting things up
until November.  As soon as the holidays are over, the seed catalog
arrive and I start planning for the next year.  By February, I have
seedlings all over the house, on grow shelves under lights, in
windowsills.  The yard may be full of snow, ice and the few
semi-thawed areas full of mud, but it's growing in *here* and nothing
feels like spring like watching seeds sprout.  ;)

Grains take a lot of work to grow in small batches yourself as
harvesting, drying, threshing and winnowing by hand is a ton of work.
Corn is the only relatively easy grain.  I don't foresee grains ever
being a huge part of our diet as overindulging once we get out there
would be a whole lot of work!

They're not a big part of our diet now, pasta is not an "easy" food
when you grind the grain by hand, mix it up with eggs, and hang it all
over your kitchen to dry.  I only bake bread a couple times a month
for the family, and that is my biggest temptation just cause of how
bread smells.  But again, grinding the grain by hand (or by foot since
hubby hooked up our grinder to a bicycle) is a lot of work even though
we're not growing it yet... way harder than plopping down a few
dollars at the store.

When we moved here a couple years ago, I lost 45 lbs in the first 8
months and maintained that +/- 5 lbs for over a year until I started
low-carbing Jan 1st.  I think it was a combination of eating real food
(thus rarely having snackage around) and a lot more physical work than
I'd been used to.  My "job" has involved sitting on my butt for the
last couple decades, so even the small amount of physical work we do
now was a big improvement.

You'd be surprised how much work it is to do even little things, like
whipping egg whites to peaks, by hand.  Especially after a few decades
in an office where typing was the most strenuous exercise.  Hubby
wasn't as bad as me, since he'd been a caver as his main hobby, but
neither of us were in very good shape when we began.

I didn't lose enough to control my blood sugar though.  My blood sugar
was really screwed up.  We went hunting in a pile of snow in December
and by the time we trudged to the place we were sitting, I was both
starving and thirsty.  I ate 4 tangerines, and on top of the already
poor blood sugar, ended up in bed for several days with horrific
cramps and severe nausea.  So yeah, one can get one's self pretty ill
from perfectly healthy natural foods (most wouldn't consider
tangerines to be junk food).

But... I am diabetic.  Steve is not and is reaping only positives from
eating real food regularly.  I have to not only eat real food, but eat
real low-carb food.

Low-carbing on a homestead is pretty easy, really.  Our hens laid 8
eggs yesterday.  They continually provide way more than I want to eat,
but not enough to sell really.  So we are drowning in eggs here.  I
was joking with my husband yesterday that we could probably survive on
eggs if we had to.  And they're *fresh* with bright orange yolks like
you don't ever see in a store!

Tonight, I'm going to spice up a chicken and leave it marinating
overnight for tomorrow - it was a live rooster last fall.  It was
raised in a fairly spacious coop with an attached run and allowed to
free-range daily.  It had a pretty decent life for a chicken before it
went in the freezer.

I have lots of jars of "low carb" spaghetti sauce on my shelf, low
carb because they're made of tomatoes, bell peppers, garlic and some
herbs.  No sugar and no sugar-substitutes either - just cooked and
cooked until sauce happenned.  And it's organic too, though not
"certified" as such - cause I know what I put on my veggies and hebrs
when growing them.

I have piles of snap peas in the freezer, my last homegrown veggies
left from last year besides some onions in the attic and potatoes in
the root cellar.

I have jars of dehydrated celery and carrots for fast soups along with
2-liters of chicken broth in the freezer.  I make a big batch of soup
and can it up, there's a bunch of turkey soup on the shelves now.
Hubby or the daughter(s) add rice or noodles when they heat a jar, I
just eat it as is.

There's fresh mache and carrots in the cold frames planted last
November and a couple tomato and pepper plants in pots producing
sporadically on my windowsills (an experiment to see if I could keep
fresh "summer" veggies overwinter).

Doing low-carb here isn't difficult really.  I'm not doing an
induction-level kind of thing, more like 30-50 grams of carb per day,
but losing well with that... 11 lbs in Jan, another 5 in Feb.  More
importantly, my blood sugar is under control and I am not sick!

The only real expense as far as food over a few months ago is that I
am spending more on dairy, which won't apply when we get out there as
we'll have more than we can use, like the eggs now.

I can't grow DaVinci syrups though.  ;)  So while I'm indulging in
them temporarily now, I don't see them as part of my long-term
maintenance.  We've both already largely lost our taste for sweets and
what remains will be satisfied with an occasional indulgence in
homegrown maple syrup in the long run.

I joined the Y because... the amount of work we'll be doing a year
from now is way more intense than now.  Clearing land, fencing
pastures, logging, digging foundations and hauling the rocks for them,
building a house, barn and outbuildings - this is a heck of a lot more
work than grinding grain, gardening or whipping egg whites or heavy
cream by hand.  There's no way to practice clearing land when the land
is already cleared, or practice building a house when you're already
in one; so the Y is important to me since there will be insane amounts
of physical work in my near future and I have to build the body to get
there.

The long-term plan is around 100 gram of carb per day for all of us -
I have planned our food-production with that number in mind.  Granted,
I don't know where I'll actually settle on maintenance, as my blood
sugar will be the barometer of what I will eat, 100 grams is just a
planning number when trying to figure out how much of what to grow.

But I don't forsee a high-carb lifestyle at any point in the future,
grains being too difficult to grow and harvest in large amounts and
maple syrup requiring nearly the calories to produce as are in it.

And we will have a major surplus of meat, dairy and eggs, so I don't
see how we *could* eat anything but a fairly low-carb diet.

This is *very* different in terms of diet from what the Nearings did,
as they were vegetarian and ate grain as a staple.  They had ethical
issues with having animals, even as pets, that I don't have.

Still, there is a lot of good info to be gleaned from their books,
even if a healthy diabetic diet is not part of that.  And they seemed
like really cool people, the sort it would be great to sit down and
have long talks with.

I suspect a high-carb diet worked for them because they were not
insulin-resistance to being with and their lifestyle involved buring
thousands of calories per day every day.  All that emphasis on whole
grains and legumes probably works just fine for non-diabetics who do
hard physical work regularly.

But I shall stick with my meat, eggs and dairy.