that's not necessarily the case.  many people find themselves stalled
even when they stay on induction.

Counting carbs is not like counting calories. In other words, fewer doesn't
necessarily mean faster weight loss. If you've tested your limits and found
that 20g is your CCL then stay at 20g. That still doesn't mean you have to
only eat induction foods. It means you should stay at 20g.

Your choice but if it's between "*uck it and dropping off the wagon" or
adding a few low carb foods from the OWL list for variety I'd opt for the
latter.

Obviously you weren't picky enough.

Now try to think through this a little deeper.

Luna

This LC character is a TROLL!  DO NOT reply to IT'S messages, you are only
egging IT on:)

So everyone here is fat or has been fat?

That's not what they claim.

LOL

MrsMCDandKids  burbled across the ether:

Not true.  JC has never been "fat".  He lowcarbs to get that last few
ounces of bodyfat off so he can be 'ripped'.  He's a bodybuilder when
he's not teaching high school aglebra.  There are several here who
aren't fat and never were.  Some are lowcarbing to keep blood sugar even
because they're diabetic, prediabetic or hypoglycemic.  Some here have
just decided that lowcarbing is a healthy way to eat.

Um, if you want to come off the winner in these little games, don't
plonk a person and then ask a question.  It looks dumb.

I agree.  I have just as many choices for dinner as before
low-carbing.  That I don't eat mashed potatoes or bread with my dinner
doesn't mean I have fewer choices... just means I leave the carb-y
stuff out.

Here's a few recent or future planned dinner menus:

turkey salad (turkey, minced dried onion, parsley, dried celery and
mayo ) with garden salad

chicken stirfried with chard, snap peas and green beans in a
soy/ginger/garlic sauce

turkey "stroganoff" - turkey with onions and mushrooms in a sour
cream/heavy cream sauce

hamburger and cabbage stir-fry in a soy/ginger/garlic sauce

corned beef and cabbage (a bit of carrot and onion added for flavor,
and potatoes for the hubby)

slices of summer sausage and various cheeses dipped in mustard with a
side of garden salad (didn't feel like cooking)

country-style ribs with Jenny's barbecue sauce, a side of cole slaw
and peas with butter

mild Italian sausage fried with red, yellow and orange bell peppers

pork chops with a side of broccoli with cheese sauce (made with just
shredded cheese and heavy cream)

ham, onion, pepper, mushroom and cheese omelet

a thick fried ham slice with a side of mustard greens flavored with
bacon drippings and a bit of onion

Polish sausage sliced in half and fried with cheddar melted on top and
a side of cauliflower mashed with cream cheese and chives

pasta-less lasagna - basically a bowl of whole-milk ricotta with some
chives mixed in, topped with a small amount of spaghetti sauce,
mozzarella and parmesan and nuked until melted together

smoked sausage with cole slaw and a side of sugar-free pickles

stuffed peppers (made some for me without rice, made some for the
family with rice - you could do the same with cabbage rolls)

Italian sausage pressed flat and cooked in a cookie sheet, drained,
then topped with pizza toppings and baked until the cheese is melted

Goodness, just with *eggs* there's a ton of variety - scrambled,
fried, crustless quiche, custards, omelets of all sorts.

A few nights ago, I made a cheesecake with a nut crust to splurge a
bit (was making a "normal" cheesecake for hubby at the same time).
More normal dessert-like snacks include ricotta, cream cheese or
yogurt with a bit of DaVinci syrup or with cocoa and sweetener.  Or
whipped cream... with a bit of cocoa comes out like a chocolate
mousse.

Granted, all of these are not for induction - but it's a huge variety
of food.  You do have to *cook* to get variety on low-carb though.
The amount of variety in Frankenfood (I like this term) is limited.

Just taking the OP's grilled chicken breast... sprinkle with a mix of
basil, oregano, parsley and olive oil before grilling for an Italian
taste.  Grill the same breast another time with a mix of cumin, chili
powder and garlic for a Mexican flavor.

If it's already grilled plain... chop it up and mix it with some mayo
or yogurt and have it on top of a garden salad.  Or chop it and mix it
with softened cream cheese and a bit of finely-minced scallion and
stuff it in celery.  Put it whole on a plate, add a TB or two of
low-carb spaghetti sauce, cover with mozzarella and sprinkle some
Parmesan and nuke.  Roll it around a slice of deli ham and a piece of
swiss and nuke.

If it's ungrilled to start with, chop it up and saute it with some
fresh ginger and garlic and add a few handfuls of your favorite
veggies and finish with some soy sauce.  Or fry it with bell peppers
and finish with some melted provolone over top.  Add it to a saucepan
of chicken broth and a few favorite veggies to simmer as a soup.  Cut
into strips and put on skewers with some low-carb barbecue or a soy
sauce and grill over a barbecue.

That's just off the top of my head.  If faced with a chicken breast
and sick of all of those ideas, I'd Google "chicken breast recipe low
carb" - and find another few score recipes.  That's where I get most
of my new recipes; Google is the best cookbook in the world.  ;)

I agree. I've been trying out new foods and more often than not, been
pleasantly surprised. I'm about to run out of things I'm willing to
try, but it has been good for me.

Lucky you! That's expensive stuff in these parts. Saffron rice is a -
scratch that - was a favorite of mine.

--  
Jean M.
New food of the week: water chestnuts

Do away with flipfloping to e-mail.

wilson  burbled across the ether:

Depends on how much cream cheese and curry powder you use. :)

I never would have thought to use cream cheese in place of or blended
with mayo.  Hmmm.   I use a dash of kosher dill pickle juice in place of
the lemon.  I'm thinking of using wasabi powder in my next batch.  But
how much?

Exactly right.

Chicken is fully cooked and safe to eat at 150F. The texture isn't
something most people would like. That's why we cook it more, to firm
up the protein. But if chicken is tough, it has been way overcooked
with a dry-cook method. That toughens and hardens the protein. Cooking
chicken in a wet-cook method like simmering or boiling won't toughen
it so much as make it fibrous and, curiously, make it dry to the bite.

 Also brine it over night. Just put it into very salty water, like

Funny you should bring it up. Below is part of a column I wrote a
while back about the subject. People kept asking why our meats in the
restaurants were more moist and tender than what they did at home. We
talked about it on my radio program and even printed up fliers for
people to take home to do their own brining. Lots of people hunt in
this area and when they saw what brining did to their game meats and
birds, it's become a very popular topic, still after these years.

Below that first column is one about chicken that's fully cooked and
still pink at the bone. This ain't your father's chicken anymore.

First, brining.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< begin quote >>>>>>>>>>>>
    Brining for Beginners
    This is one of those “gotta have faith” pieces. I want you to sink
meats, birds and seafoods in some salty water so they'll cook faster,
be better tasting, more tender and more juicy. Yeah, I know. Sounds
absurd. But it really works and now it's all the thing.
    Time was when there were no refrigerators. Meat spoils quickly. All
kinds of meats - four-legged, winged and the ones with gills. What to
do? Well, there were several choices for storage. Put it under cold
water. Store it hanging in a cold root cellar or springhouse. You
could hang the meat over a slow, smoky fire. Anything else?
    The other major way to store meat was to pickle it; to brine it. Sink
it in a flavored brine and in fairly short order, you have a piece of
meat that won't spoil any time soon. We still have some being produced
like that nowadays. Corned beef. Pastrami. Many different kinds of
hams. You know them.
    That's the new-old method, but with some modern changes. Brining the
meats. Here's what happens. The salt and sugar act to draw moisture
out of the meats. Then a kind of balance is struck where no more
juices come out of the meat. Then, in a funny reversal, the brine is
taken up by the meat bringing moisture and flavoring into the meat. It
makes the meat plumper and juicier. It makes it more forgiving in
cooking. It makes your dinner a bit more tender. What's to not like?
    We aren't going to pickle them, just soak them in a light brine
solution. Stay with me here. We aren't making the meats taste salty,
just better. And cook more quickly.
    Poultry, pork, lamb, beef and game meats can all be brined and I
guarantee they'll be tastier, juicier and more tender than without
brining. Brining will also shorten cooking times. Cook as you always
do, just check on the progress of the meats a bit earlier and more
often than usual until you get the sense of it. And this isn't just
for special occasions. Every time you cook meats, they can benefit
from this approach. Discard the brines after using once.
    BASIC MEAT BRINE
    This much brine will take care of a 3 or 4 pound piece of pork loin,
a chicken (or chicken pieces), a 3 or 4 pound beef, lamb or veal
roast. How long to leave the meats in the brine? Depends. For poultry,
at least 24 hours. Up to about 36 hours. Roasts benefit from 3 days or
more. Since I first started doing this, I've evolved my recipe. This
is the one I'm working with now.
    1 quart water
    1/4 cup salt
    2 tablespoons sugar
    1/2 tablespoon black pepper
    1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
    2 teaspoons fresh oregano leaves
    4 or 5 bay leaves, crumbled
    4 cloves garlic, smashed
    2 tablespoons vinegar
Heat the water and add the remaining ingredients. Bring to a low
simmer, stir a few times and remove from the heat. Let cool.
    That's the brine. How to use it? One very easy way is a gallon
freezer bag. Put the meat in the bag and pour the cooled brine over
it. Squeeze out much of the air, put the bag in a container and
refrigerate. Just in case of leaks.
    Variations: Well, for the basic brine, you can add or subtract any
flavorings you want. The amounts of water, salt and sugar should
remain fairly constant, but the other ingredients are variable.
    For duck, goose and other oily birds, add 2 tablespoons ground
ginger, a cup of soy sauce and 1/4 cup orange juice concentrate. Stick
the duck all over with a fork and brine for 3 or 4 days. Roast in a
400 oven for about an hour.
    Chicken pieces benefit from the juice of a lemon and a tablespoon of
rubbed sage added to the brine.
    BRINED PORK AND VEAL CHOPS
    These chops will be rosy inside like a good cured ham and very
tender. Don't try to cook the wonderful pink color out, you'll ruin them.
    1/ 2 cup brown sugar
    1/4 cup salt
    10 black peppercorns
    5 bay leaves
    2 tablespoons mixed dried herbs (rosemary, oregano, thyme, and sage)
    1 quart hot water
    3 quarts ice water
    12 chops, 1 inch thick
    olive oil or cooking spray
Put sugar and salt in a large nonreactive container - plastic, glass
or stainless steel. Add the hot water and stir to dissolve. Add other
seasonings and let sit for a few minutes to rehydrate herbs. Stir in
the ice water. Submerge the pork chops in the brine. Cover the
container and refrigerate for 24 hours or more. Or use the freezer bag
technique. To cook, remove the chops from the brine, pat dry and
lightly brush or spray with oil. Grill, broil or pan-fry. Figure 7 to
9 minutes per side.
    And don't forget that turkey or the venison leg. Got a really big
bucket? Enjoy very much.
<<<<<<<<<<<<< end quote >>>>>>>>>>>>>

Now let's look at why chicken seems to be still pink at the bone even
when thermometers say it's cooked.

<<<<<<<<< begin quote >>>>>>>>>>>>>>
    It's the “new” chicken
    I've cooked thousands of pieces of chicken over the years.  Probably
hundreds of thousands.  Never any problems.  But in the last few
years, I kept getting them back in the various restaurants because
there was pink at the bones.  It looked like it wasn't fully cooked.
    I checked oven temperatures and oil temperatures in our deep fryers.
 I checked the thermometers we were using to check the ovens and oil.
 Everything was right.  Why were we getting chicken with redness
around the bones?  We were having to fry chicken until it was dark
brown and just beginning to get that burned taste before people would
accept it.
    It was dry and terribly overcooked.  Didn't look good and didn't
taste good.  Back to the good old days for a second.  My grandmother
used to keep chickens.  Well, she kept hens and one rooster.  The hens
were for eggs, primarily.  When my grandmother wanted chicken, one of
the hens went into the pot.  They were likely a year or so old when
she roasted them or made her wonderful stew or cut them up to fry.
    Never any redness at the bone.  The chicken was moist, skin crisp and
it was tasty with the seasonings she used.  Same sort of thing with
the stews.  Big pieces of chicken falling off the bone.  What's the
difference?
    A bit of science and a little technology for a second here.  It used
to be, not too many years ago, that chickens in the stores were about
12 weeks old and weighed maybe three pounds, three ounces at
slaughter.  Their bones were fully formed and calcified.
    Today, because of advances in nutritional knowledge and antibiotics,
chickens can be slaughtered at 6 weeks at that same weight.  Their
younger bones aren't fully calcified.  That means that back then, the
bones were harder than they are today.
    As long as that older chicken wasn't frozen, the bones were solid.
Freezing makes them porous.  And youth means they're porous. The color
comes from the marrow leaking through the bone when cooking the birds.
    Well, I didn't know all this and was getting customer complaints.  I
needed solutions.   It didn't seem to be a problem with turkey, so I
tried what I do with them.  Nope.  Still got redness.
    I talked to a person from one of the poultry packers who told me I
had to cook the chicken to 185F in the thigh in a 350F oven.  And that
would get rid of that red.  I tried it and it didn't.  It just dried
out the chicken and turned it a not very pretty dark brown.
    Tried other things.  Brined it.  That improved it in many ways, but
still had the red.  Salted it (koshered it).  Nope.  Even tried
blanching it (not sure why.  Just science in action, I guess.).  Nope.
 Poached it (yuck) but still had red.  I never found a solution.
Still got chicken with redness at the bone.
    I knew that it would be perfectly safe if I cooked it to more than
155F at the bone.  So I tried the whole thing backward - cooked it to
160 (coward) in a 325F convection oven.  Roast it to that temp and see
what would happen.  It was golden brown like I remember chicken
looking, the skin was just beginning to crisp and the leg moved easily.
    I looked inside the cavity.  The juices looked clear, another sign of
doneness.  I cut the leg off.  Blood.  I tipped the chicken up to pour
the juices out of the cavity.  It was - mostly - clear.  There was a
bit of darkness in the juice.  I knew the science would say that it
was safe because of the extent of the reduction of salmonella and
other critters, given the temperature reached.
    I tried the meat.  It was wonderful.  Moist.  Flavorful.  Amazingly
tender.  But it was red at the bone and the juices were slightly
tinged with red.  At first, I was reluctant to eat any of it because
of what I “knew.”  My eyes told me I was eating raw chicken and my
head knows that raw chicken is dangerous.
    I knew I couldn't offer that to a consuming public and expect them to
accept it.  I came to the conclusion that I couldn't solve the problem
and all that was left was to simply overcook chicken to get consumer
acceptance.
    This discussion came up on a professional chefs mailing list I
subscribe to on the internet when someone else brought up the problem
he was having with red chicken.  I explained what I did to try to
solve the problem and finally conceded that I just couldn't seem to
come to a satisfactory answer.
    I got a note addressed to me from O. Peter Snyder, Jr., Ph.D.  who is
associated with the Hospitality Institute of Technology and
Management.  Their slogan is “One worldwide uniform set of retail food
safety guidelines” and this is his area of expertise.  In the
professional foodservice community, he's considered a very good source
of scientific information.
    Dr. Snyder wrote, “You have done a great job of trying to find a
solution. But there is no solution that I can find to this problem
except to teach the consumer to eat bloody chicken.  I can guarantee
if the area around the bone gets to 150F for about a minute as
measured with a tip sensitive thermocouple, the chicken is absolutely
safe to eat and very bloody.”
    He went on to say, “ Because we want cheaper chicken in the future,
you can expect the chickens to be even younger and bones less developed.
    “It looks to me that the only workable answer is to get the
consumer/chef to use a tip sensitive thermometer such as a thermistor
or thermocouple and cook to above 150F for 1 minute and learn to enjoy
bloody chicken.”
    Understand something here.  I am absolutely not picking on the
poultry folks.  The laws of biology and physics are outside their
control.  They're in business to make money, just like everybody else.
 They're concerned with what they produce like any other farmers.
The faster they can get the chickens to market, the cheaper it is to
raise them.  The cheaper it is to raise them, the cheaper it is for us
to buy them.  Looks like a win-win situation.
    Except for one thing.  We have to change our minds about something.
It used to be, when chickens were slaughtered when older, that there
was never any redness at the bones.  And, in fact, that was one of the
signs of undercooked chicken.  No more.  The old rules don't hold
anymore.  And, in further fact, they specifically will mislead you.
    My suggestion?  Buy a quick read thermometer and cook chicken to
about 160F in the thigh, not touching the bone.  It'll be done, juicy,
tasty and satisfying.  It won't look like chicken of a decade or more
ago.  It isn't the same critter.  It's more tender and juicy.  Can't
believe your eyes, though.  But if you do it this way, your taste buds
will thank you.
<<<<<<<<<<< end quote

Hey DiVi,
Brining improves the texture, adds flavor, and helps in retaining moisture
when the meat is cooked. It's a great old technique.

I was a chef for many, many years but have retired from the field. I've been
lurking and not posting much lately.

in

some

As long as you've proven that you lose best at induction levels that's
great. However,I'm guessing you are assuming that based upon "less
carbs means more loss".  I'm up to 35 carbs now and I'm losing just as
fast as I did on Induction(in fact slightly higher rate). Only when
you hit your personal CCLL does loss theoretically drop off because
the benefits of continual ketosis(BDK) are lost.  Consuming the same
amount of food with 10,20,30 crabs for me doesn't change weight loss.
You aren't cutting carbs like low-fat cuts fat. You just need to go
low enough to induce ketosis. Hopefully cravings will be reduced
enough at that point that you naturally eat less (cuts calories).

There are a hundred ways to lose weight. And every person is a bit
different. Don't be afraid to explore what works for you, even if it
didn't work for others. People here stall on induction and they broke
the stall by upping carbs and starting OWL.

DiGiTAL_ViNYL (no email)
350/314/Mar-315/200
Atkins since Jan 12, 2004
OWL-35 carbs/day (CCLL=?)

writes:

Why on earth did you come here to ask questions of people with vast experience
on this diet if you think you know everything?  It's one thing to express
opinions and ask questions, but you're just plain belligerent.  You're as much
a troll as JC is, maybe worse, and you're going into my killfile as soon as I
send this post.

Daria
166/148/140
sugar-free since 2/1/04
low-carb since 2/17/04