The Basic Drink Your Carbs Diet
It is often said that one cannot “have one’s cake and eat it too.”
We say, “Forget the cake. It’s rarely worth the calories. But do tell me what you have on tap behind the bar.”
Basic Drink Your Carbs is our diet in its most simple form. Overhauling your diet on Basic is easy. We have done all of the work short of chewing your food. The Food List is the key. The Food List includes those foods that can be eaten all the time, those that should be eaten only on a limited basis and those that must be avoided altogether. The list is further broken into categories to make shopping easy. Some of your favorite foods are invariably in the “Avoid” category. This is the price you must to pay if you want to lose weight while continuing to drink alcohol.
Once you decide to embrace the Drink Your Carbs lifestyle, the first thing you should do is eliminate all non-Drink Your Carbs foods in your home. Everything that is labeled “Avoid” on the Food List has to go. This should be done even before you take the Food List to the grocery store for the first time. Donate your unopened cans to a local homeless shelter. Throw a party and serve the remainder to your friends and family. Do whatever it takes to get these foods out of your life before you start. The goal of this process is to make it more difficult to backtrack than it will be to move forward.
Once you decide to embrace the Drink Your Carbs lifestyle, the first thing you should do is eliminate all non-Drink Your Carbs foods in your home. Everything that is labeled “Avoid” on the Food List has to go. This should be done even before you take the Food List to the grocery store for the first time. Donate your unopened cans to a local homeless shelter. Throw a party and serve the remainder to your friends and family. Do whatever it takes to get these foods out of your life before you start. The goal of this process is to make it more difficult to backtrack than it will be to move forward.
Fact: We apply the same thinking to purging your home of unhealthy foods as Betty Ford employed with drugs and alcohol. Mrs. Ford insisted that, in order to start the healing process, her clients needed to distance themselves physically from the substances to which they were addicted. Without irony, we apply this same common-sense notion to the junk food in your kitchen.
Most people can successfully dive straight into Basic Drink Your Carbs. Some people, however, aren’t ready to commit to a structure that requires a list. We designed the Food List to be comprehensive and flexible, but nonetheless we continually hear from people who are asking for simpler steps that can be implemented easily and quickly and without so much as a single trip to the supermarket.
Perhaps it’s the flexibility that makes Food List difficult for some people. One friend told us, “There are too many choices here. I want something that doesn’t require me to spend a ton of time thinking about it.”
For her and for others who feel the same way, we have created Three Simple Steps.
These three steps are not as effective as Basic Drink Your Carbs, but they will get you 80 percent the way there. For most, this is more than enough guidance to start dropping weight. More importantly, once you fully implement these three steps, making the leap into Basic will be easy.
Perhaps it’s the flexibility that makes Food List difficult for some people. One friend told us, “There are too many choices here. I want something that doesn’t require me to spend a ton of time thinking about it.”
For her and for others who feel the same way, we have created Three Simple Steps.
These three steps are not as effective as Basic Drink Your Carbs, but they will get you 80 percent the way there. For most, this is more than enough guidance to start dropping weight. More importantly, once you fully implement these three steps, making the leap into Basic will be easy.
Three Simple Steps
Step 1: Avoid all deep-fried foods.
In defense of deep-fried foods, they are likely to be the foods that allow humans to travel to Mars. The problem with deep-space travel is that each astronaut requires around 2000 calories per day to stay healthy. The trip to Mars will take roughly four years, two years there and two back. That adds up to a huge quantity of food that must be loaded alongside fuel, water, air and scientific equipment. The key to making the journey will be finding foods that are small in size but pack a wallop, calorie wise. In this one way, deep-frying is like a miracle. It adds an enormous number of calories while contributing little bulk. Of course, deep-fried foods also tend to be disgracefully low in vitamins, minerals and overall nutritional density. But that’s a problem NASA scientists will have to solve for themselves. We can’t do all their work for them.
If you’re not preparing for a trip into deep space, deep-fried foods are more like a letter to Santa stating that all you want for Christmas is diabetes. [Really.]
Step 2: Avoid all added sugar and other sweeteners.
This applies to food as well as drink.
In the rarified world of Drink Your Carbs, we refer to the no sweetened beverage restriction as the No Mixer Rule. It prohibits all sweet and sweetened beverages, including fruit juice. No Mixers is an exchange all drinkers must make in order to cut sufficient calories to both lose weight and continuing drinking alcohol.
No more sodas. No more orange juice. No simple syrup in your cocktails. No more schnapps or other sweet liquors. Fortunately, this is Drink Your Carbs: wine, beer and non-sweetened spirits are still very much allowed.
Step 3: Eat nothing white.
This rule should be treated as a guideline rather than a religious decree. The goal here is to eliminate simple starches from your diet. Unfortunately, nature lacks consistency. Most white foods, such as white bread, white rice and potatoes tend to be low in nutrition and high in calories.
Nature spawned a few white foods, such as cauliflower, egg whites and cooked chicken breast, which are the exact opposite. These white foods have high-nutritional density and should be part of a healthy weight-loss program. We considered adding an asterisk to “Eat nothing white.” We considered changing the name of this rule to “Avoid all foods with a clown on the label.”
Instead we will simply implore you to use common sense. Seriously, it’s not that hard to figure out which white foods to eliminate. If you do get confused, we won’t leave you hanging. First, check the label for artificial colors. Then look for more subtle signs. For example, the misspelling of “fruit” in Froot Loops should be a dead giveaway that the color cannot be trusted. The best policy is, if you’re truly in doubt assume that the food you’re contemplating is white and don’t eat it. Choose something instead that is obviously and naturally colorful.
And we’re not kidding about the clown on the label; those foods are definitely the kind of white you should never go near.
In defense of deep-fried foods, they are likely to be the foods that allow humans to travel to Mars. The problem with deep-space travel is that each astronaut requires around 2000 calories per day to stay healthy. The trip to Mars will take roughly four years, two years there and two back. That adds up to a huge quantity of food that must be loaded alongside fuel, water, air and scientific equipment. The key to making the journey will be finding foods that are small in size but pack a wallop, calorie wise. In this one way, deep-frying is like a miracle. It adds an enormous number of calories while contributing little bulk. Of course, deep-fried foods also tend to be disgracefully low in vitamins, minerals and overall nutritional density. But that’s a problem NASA scientists will have to solve for themselves. We can’t do all their work for them.
If you’re not preparing for a trip into deep space, deep-fried foods are more like a letter to Santa stating that all you want for Christmas is diabetes. [Really.]
Step 2: Avoid all added sugar and other sweeteners.
This applies to food as well as drink.
In the rarified world of Drink Your Carbs, we refer to the no sweetened beverage restriction as the No Mixer Rule. It prohibits all sweet and sweetened beverages, including fruit juice. No Mixers is an exchange all drinkers must make in order to cut sufficient calories to both lose weight and continuing drinking alcohol.
No more sodas. No more orange juice. No simple syrup in your cocktails. No more schnapps or other sweet liquors. Fortunately, this is Drink Your Carbs: wine, beer and non-sweetened spirits are still very much allowed.
Step 3: Eat nothing white.
This rule should be treated as a guideline rather than a religious decree. The goal here is to eliminate simple starches from your diet. Unfortunately, nature lacks consistency. Most white foods, such as white bread, white rice and potatoes tend to be low in nutrition and high in calories.
Nature spawned a few white foods, such as cauliflower, egg whites and cooked chicken breast, which are the exact opposite. These white foods have high-nutritional density and should be part of a healthy weight-loss program. We considered adding an asterisk to “Eat nothing white.” We considered changing the name of this rule to “Avoid all foods with a clown on the label.”
Instead we will simply implore you to use common sense. Seriously, it’s not that hard to figure out which white foods to eliminate. If you do get confused, we won’t leave you hanging. First, check the label for artificial colors. Then look for more subtle signs. For example, the misspelling of “fruit” in Froot Loops should be a dead giveaway that the color cannot be trusted. The best policy is, if you’re truly in doubt assume that the food you’re contemplating is white and don’t eat it. Choose something instead that is obviously and naturally colorful.
And we’re not kidding about the clown on the label; those foods are definitely the kind of white you should never go near.