Low Carb in your face

Low carb evangelist and author Dana Carpender asks how her readers tell people they are low carb, so here’s my take.

A lot of people around me know I’m eating a low-carb diet. My co-workers read my blog occasionally, and I’ve talked about it on Facebook as well. There’s also the small matter of me eating cheese and meat at my desk almost every lunch time — people tend to notice that pattern.

When I first started eating this way, I was concerned about people thinking me strange or irresponsible for eating a low-carb diet. As I mentioned before it was very important for my self-image not to eat like a stereotypical fat man. But when you eat the hamburger patty but throw out the bun, low-fat fans are going to think you’re insane.

I got over that by realizing that, at over three hundred pounds, people already thought me fat, lazy, and irresponsible. Eating strangely was not going to make the difference. So now it doesn’t bother me to eat low-carb in public.

What I don’t do is hassle wait staff with low-carb requests: can I get that without the bun? How many grams of carbohydrate are in the dressing? Etc. For one thing my diet is moderately low carb — I don’t obsess, the way Dana does, about eating watermelon.

Dana also says this about sugar:

I often simply say “I don’t do sugar.” Not “I don’t eat sugar,” but “I don’t do sugar,” the verb “do” in this context being deliberately evocative of the idea of “doing drugs.”

I try to avoid this kind of approach because it sounds like moralizing. I’m happy to argue the benefits of low-carb eating with anyone. I think there are scads of people who would benefit from eating this way. But I’d rather not attach any moral value to food. There is some, of course, but people get plenty of that already. Anyway, I’ve never found the high-and-mighty harangue to be particularly persuasive or effective. Much better, I think, to eat what I eat and let other people draw their own conclusions.