When I tell people I’m eating a low-carbohydrate diet a lot of them think I’ve eliminated carbohydrate altogether. I guess they imagine me frying three pounds of bacon for myself every morning, eating massive porterhouse steaks every night, and avoiding broccoli as though it were a rabid badger. That’s not really what being low-carbohydrate is like.

The Elf and I do eat quite a bit more meat than we used to, but it’s because we’re eating meat at more meals, not because we cram that much more on our plates. Besides meat and cheese, we also get a fair amount of protein from nuts. Peanuts or pistachios are a popular snack now, and they carry several grams of carbohydrate with every serving.

We also eat berries and nectarines, lettuce, tomatoes, asparagus, broccoli, artichokes, and onions. In fact, we can eat almost any vegetables we please in quantities that exceed any rational person’s desire.

What we really cut back on are the starchy and sugary foods. Bread is only an occasional thing instead of the foundation for a meal. Potato products are out. Refined flour and sugar are out. And that also means most prepared or semi-prepared foods are also verboten.

As a result, we end up shopping the way Michael Pollan recommended: along the perimeter of the grocery store. We just spend more time at the meat and dairy counters than he would.

So the image of us gorging ourselves on massive fatty steaks and piles of fried bacon are fantasy. I don’t know if we are eating fewer calories than we were previously — we may be. But we are certainly eating less volume because it’s very hard to overstuff yourself on meat, dairy, and vegetables.

But starches, sugars, and refined carbohydrates? They make eating anything easy.