Magazine Recipe Altering for Slow-Carb Diets
Posted Jun 10, 2011
If you remember back in January I wrote about how I was on a diet based on the book the 4 Hour Body. Tim (the writer) really refers to this diet as the Slow-Carb diet. However, it is actually a modified version of the Paleo-diet that goes off reservation by including legumes and you also get a carb-o-licious splurge day to feast on whatever your heart desires once a week.
My first attempt was encouraging I did lose 10 pounds in just over 30 days, however I lost my mojo after getting back my February BodPod results because my body fat was still showing 21%. My goal was (and still is) to get down to around 12%. Body fat percentages can be deceiving because my actual fat was down, but unfortunately so was my lean body mass.
So my friend and I decided to do round two for 30 days throughout May. We actually put a $100 wager on the results and this time I decided to record everything I ate. In doing so, I noticed how easily I cheated in random places. The good news was, I lost another 10 lbs (I gained back about 3 pounds between March and the end of April before the diet). I did achieve my goal of getting down to a healthy weight for my height, but I lost the wager since it was based on the delta (change in weight, overall inches, and body fat). My excuse…he had more to lose than me.
In round two what changed? Well this time, I went back to my old faithful…skipping breakfast. If you take a look in the back of the 4 Hour Body book notes, you’ll see that the people made the largest gains when they knocked down their consumption from 3 meals a day down to 2 meals a day. I didn’t change too much else except how I got my recipes and the smack talk. My friend and I did a lot more trash talking, which honestly did seem to help motivate me.
As for the recipes, well…since I do work for a magazine service, I have full access to several cooking magazines including Cooking Light, Saveur, Bon Appetit, all the Food Network magazines, and Everyday Food. As I suggested in the other post about my dieting adventures, you can use just about any other recipe from any magazine as long as you omit the carb-based component(s), fruit, and dairy. Most recipes taste just as good, as long as they don’t rely on bread or cheese as the main flavor base.
Take for example the June 2011 issue of Bon Appetit…pages 90 and 91 serve up seven delicious looking crostinies. A crostini is grilled toast with a combination of toppings (like bruscetta). Now if you think about it, the toast itself is really just an edible vehicle for getting the real flavorful toppings into your mouth. Now of course, with the 4 Hour Body diet, you have to leave off the cheese based components or save just these delicious bites for your cheat day. So in this case, what can you replace the bread with to stay within your limits of a Slow-Carb diet? I suggest Grilled portabellas (baby or full sized), Grilled flat slices of zucchini or summer squash, Or if the topping is complementary you could even use something cold like slice of cucumber or an iceberg lettuce leaf.
Speaking of iceberg lettuce, I found the most amazing recipe for Slow-Carb lettuce wraps on a blog that I was following during my dieting adventure. This one was extremely tasty and even my picky 4 year old liked it. Check it out here…
What’s the next step for me?
I am starting on page 181 (4 Hour Body), From Geek to Freak and will be testing gaining 34 pounds in 28 days. Actually, the new bet I have with my friend, I will be going for at least 25 pounds of lean muscle mass in 60 days and dropping my fat percentage down to around 12%. Time to change my eating habits again!