Being A Seven-Day Account Of Our Intrepid Food Editor's Descent Into The Wilds Of Low-Carb Eating

The Georgia Straight

- By Angela Murrills

Just as I'm within sight of the checkered flag in a multilap tasting menu, a snarky voice--my interior Gollum--suggests that, maybe this time, I don't have to finish everything on my plate. I ignore it. (This happens often.) The upshot, over the past year, has been a certain rounding of the contours. So when the founder and president of the Specialty Gourmet, suggests I try his low-carb diet, with meals delivered to my door for a week, free, it's an offer too good to pass up. (Readers will note this is a radical departure from my normal practice of reviewing anonymously and on my own dime.)

This no-carb thing really seems to work. With his wife absent for the summer, my neighbour has grown sylphlike by consuming meat, cheese, vegetables, fruit, and interesting Burgundies. Chef Karen Barnaby of the Fish House in Stanley Park is the poster child for a rice-and-potato-free diet, having lost, at last count, an amount of weight the size of a Rocky. Restaurants around town report selling massive steaks but group avoidance of baked potatoes. Theoretically, I could diet alone, but daily delivery of monitored food makes it less likely I'll fall off the wagon. Even so, as I point out to Malkin, along with consuming the 20 grams of usable carbs a day permitted by the induction program, my job does entail frequently putting my knees under others' tables. Since early August is fallow season in the restaurant world, I pick that as my skinny-down time, and here, more or less, is what happens.

First I register on-line, consigning weight, hip, and abdominal measurements into cyberspace. Because meals are on a 28-day cycle (which you enter at some point), even though I'm on a one-week program, I am asked to select breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack for the next four. Choosing so far ahead makes me realize my own eating preferences: fish over meat, chicken over red meat, lamb over beef; snacks, yes; allergies, none. Tick, tick, fill out the boxes, hit Send. Each night, between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., a cooler of daily provisions will be left on my porch; apartment dwellers work out separate arrangements.

I want to be clear on this. "Nothing else must pass my lips except what you bring me?" I ask client-services person Carla Scholten over the phone.

"That's right."

Right.

Day 1 It's all there with instructions. I can drink plenty of water but no caffeine. Too late. I'm already into a second mug of black java. I nuke breakfast: oven-puffed pancakes with rhubarb sauce. Not bad, and more filling than they look. Lunch is a salmon steak still moist (because caterers the Lazy Gourmet factor in that you'll cook it a bit longer) and a crunchy green salad. By 4 p.m. I attack my snack of crab and red-pepper strips. By 6:28, even though I usually eat dinner on Spanish time, I start thinking of supper. By 6:40, I've eaten it (pork ratatouille). By 10, I'm ravenous. Tomorrow's supply arrives and I sneak a large chunk from the pralines-and-cream diet bar. Sweet. Then I down another glass of water.

Day 2 I practise my mantra--No Bun, No Buns--as I sit down to eggs Benedict (the yolks still runny, no small achievement). A restaurant lunch at Feenie's is easy: grilled salmon, vegetables, and a green-olive tapenade.

Day 3 At the Naam I order a California salad but skip the taco chips. I have fallen into a bad habit of "sampling" tomorrow's snack when I retrieve the cooler each night. Tomorrow's is sensational: a rich, fudgy French silk pie (made, I learn later, with sugar substitute, butter, eggs, vanilla extract, and unsweetened chocolate). I finish it.

Day 4 Scholten makes a routine call to check how I'm doing. I can alter portion size if I want, she says, at no extra cost. By now I'm used to more petite plates, and I genuinely don't feel hungry. If I do, I drink water. Each time I visit the bathroom, which is increasingly often, I admire my skin.

Day 5 A kilo disappears overnight.

Day 6 My shorts definitely feel looser.

Day 7 That night, I jump on the scales. Total loss: close to two kilos, even including a nutritionally indefensible picnic one night of shrimp chips and Scotch. Another week of being careful (the odd slice of toast does creep in) whittles off a further kilo and a half. I'll never give up carbs completely, but I now watch what I eat more carefully, and let me tell you something: that first week's jump-start really helps

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