Continuing thread for week 1 Low Carb Bootcamp

[BIWI]

I know we only have another day or so before the next thread, but the last one was almost full!

70s child here. I LOVED chocolate Angel Delight but tried it again a few years ago and thought it was foul. Never did like the butterscotch one.

Nice Atkins ad there mumsnet!

Woke up this morning dreaming about toast and sugary carbs

May I just ask what's the long term WOE? Happy to do bootcamp for another week or two but what happens next? What does bootcamp lite allow? I'm thinking probably not a Lidl apple turnover

Thanks for the new thread. Interesting to read about childhood food memories. I was born in 74 and remember angel delight and crispy pancakes. The only pasta I had came out of a tin,

I was born mid 60s. Mum was very interested in healthy eating and we had wholemeal pasta and olive oil. She'd buy both from health food shops in London. I remember her having the book pure white and deadly (about the dangers of sugar). Still managed to eat angel delight though!!

Jumping I was posting that an important part of weight maintenance is learning how to handle Socially Obligated Sugar. There will always be times people will practically force you to eat something you don't want to. A typical example would be birthday cake at work. You can stand your ground and say no. You can take a slice and discreetly not eat it. You can take a slice and give it to the nearest willing volunteer. You can take a slice and just nibble at it and leave the rest / hide it under a napkin. You can take a slice and eat it - if you know it's going to happen then one option is to eat lower carb for the rest of the day. My biggest problem has been when my kids were toddlers and wanted to share their food with me. It's very hard to say no when a two-year-old is attempting to put crisps in your mouth!

The thing about this WOE in the longer term is that people just accept it. We don't routinely have cakes in the office, but everyone knows that I don't 'do' carbs. It's my 'normal' just as it is for the couple we have in the office (of around 20 people) who are vegans.

Hopefully more and more people - especially as there are more reports like the one linked above - will also accept this and won't keep pushing stuff on to others!

@Scabbersley Bootcamp Light rules are on the spreadsheet, but essentially it means you can:

• decide to drop breakfast if you want to (basically you can go to 2 meals a day from 3; it doesn't have to be breakfast, but usually that's the easiest meal to drop)

• add in some fruit, occasionally. But low carb fruit - there's a fruit carb counter on the spreadsheet as well if you want to check the carb counts. Generally this means berries. (NEVER bananas, which are really high in carbs!)

• add in nuts and seeds too - but also occasionally. These can get carby very quickly so be careful.

• drink alcohol - in moderation and also occasionally. The body will burn alcohol as its fuel before any other source, so even if you stick to low carb alcohol, your body will still stop burning fat all the time you're drinking

• include artificial sweeteners if, for example, you're making a special dessert; in other words, not pudding every day!

You don't have to switch to Bootcamp Light if you don't want to - if Bootcamp is working for you then it's fine to continue (as long as you promise faithfully that you will be getting your carbs mainly from veg and salad!). Some people do a hybrid of Bootcamp during the week and Bootcamp Light at the weekend.

My mum was a good, and adventurous cook, and we did have meals with rice and pasta, although pasta came along only in the 70s - and it was really only spaghetti, that used to come in very long, blue packets - about 2 feet long!

And even if we did have spaghetti Bolognese, it would have been made by frying the mince in lard, as olive oil was something that you got in little bottles from the chemist, to help unblock waxy ears! And the Parmesan that went on the top was dried, came out of a little shaker that was kept in the cupboard - and smelled of vomit!

We always had puddings - usually tinned fruit with evaporated milk, or sliced Swiss roll with custard (which my mum made with evaporated milk rather than ordinary milk, and left out the sugar). As a treat we might have Angel Delight - and I loved the butterscotch one

I also used to drink half a pint of milk with all my meals - never liked squash that much.

80s child here. I grew up on meals of frozen burgers/chicken nuggets/fish fingers, waffles/mash/potato faces and spaghetti. Only 'proper' meal was a Sunday dinner. Embarrassing really. And no wonder I have food issues now. My Mum feels awful about it now but didn't know any better!

I was an 80s child and actually ate really well. My mum was a good cook and we were only allowed wholemeal things. Crisps and sweets were a rare treat.

Still have massive issues with food though. I think I lack the full switch. And when I was old enough to choose things for myself I over indulged in bad foods because I wasn't really allowed them. My friends who are crap all the time seemed to be really skinny.

I had a dream last night that I ate two massive slices of cheesecake and had fucked it all up. Took me about 5 mins this morning to realise that it didn't actually happen!

I was born in the early 80s, but my mum was unusual in that although she worked full time, she would cook from scratch every night. Traditional things, like cottage pie, loads of veg etc. My parents were cosmopolitan and had friends from other cultures, so when we were a bit older, she would experiment with for eg Russian cuisine, homemade curries etc. I used to love helping her.

We again rarely had sweets or pudding. We did have cereal for breakfast though and me and my brother used to fight over the top of the milk! I remember my favourite thing being when my dad collected us from school and making a peanut butter sandwich for after school snack (one piece of bread folded over. Usually brown bread)

In the 90s, my mum decided she needed to lose weight and started the Rosemary Conley diet, so we all started eating weird low fat stuff which was rubbish. It just went downhill from there really with food and my parents getting divorced and I developed anorexia, which really fucked up my relationship with food for the rest of my life! Veering between bingeing and starving. Interesting that this only developed once we'd started eating low fat stuff!

Food today:
B - cream cheese pancakes (running)
L - dunno
D - leftover chilli and cauliflower rice

My tablet keeps refreshing & losing my posts. Very annoying. Anyway, breakfast & dinner are planned, lunch will be something with salad & homemade dressing (the mayonnaise failed to thicken so it's in 2 bottles with chilli / lemon so I have a choice of flavours). Dinner will be the most low-carb friendly version of crack slaw I can manage, I have beef mince, kale & savoy to use up.

I'm making Christmas cake today. DH has requested it. Plus all my family always want some, & we have about 7 elderly single neighbours who I'm planning to give some to. I plan to eat a couple of pieces only. I did lick the spoon yesterday before it got washed though, that I'd used for the turning the dried fruit that is soaking in juice & booze.

I too remember growing up (in the 80s) with proper home cooked food & almost never having sweets, snacks, crisps etc. I was enormously excited on the one occasion I was allowed a birthday party as my mum bought us fizzy drinks! She was a good cook & we had cake several times a year, & lots of different types of food. My dad used to cook Chinese & Indian food and, considering we are white British, I now realise that (especially for the time & considering we don't live in London or any other large city) his recipes were very good. He obviously went to a lot of trouble to get proper ingredients etc. I never learned to cook until I left home though - my mum seems to have thought I would learn it by osmosis & was most surprised that I needed a cookbook for uni, despite her never having shown me how to do any of it.

I was born in 85, but grew up mostly in caravans with limited cooking facilities and often no electric so no fridge/freezer. Mum was a vegetarian and had her own food issues (bulimia for years), our meals were very carb based or things from tins like spaghetti and sausages. Food was often in short supply, but to make up for this I'd be allowed to eat toast in massive quantities or a whole deep pan pizza age 13...
I did actually learn to cook before I left home though I mostly existed on carbs as it was quick, cheap and easy. Had first child age 20 and started cooking proper meals for DH and I, but again carb portions were massive.

These days, my kids don't really have snacks - managed to get them out of the habit and now they are fine with 3 meals a day. DS occasionally has a snack at morning break as he's in secondary school, but none have a snack when they get in. Just a cup of tea (with one small spoon of sugar, if you don't start them with 2 then they don't expect it!). I'm trying to reduce carb portions and up the fat, teach them that sugar is bad in quantities - recently been weighing their sweets when they buy them so they know what the recommended 25g of added sugar looks like, it isn't a lot!

We all have years of bad habits and poor education around food to overcome. As well as the emotional side of eating.

For me, this last 9.5 months is the longest I have stuck to any way of eating/weight loss plan. I plan to carry on eating like this for life, the food tastes amazing and there are few things that I miss - pasta doesn't appeal at all and when I do have a mouthful to taste food I'm cooking, the texture is really off putting! I can walk past sweets/chocolate without wanting them. It's crazy, never thought I'd see the day that happens. For maintainence I will only eat carbs that are worth it, rather than just for the sake of it. It's so liberating!

I'm a child of the 80s, but we were too poor for Findus! Did get a lot of food from Iceland, though (as they would deliver, and we didn't have a car). I do remember her having the boil in the bag cod things from time to time (but not me, I hate fish).

My mother is definitely a disciple of the 'fat is bad' crusade. If something HAD to be fried she'd use a couple of sprays of Fry Light, but if she could avoid it she would. Mince for Spag Bol would be boiled for an age (stinking out the house) before everything was assembled and put in the oven. She isn't a fan of taste, either (except Marmite, which would be added to said Spag Bol, but then clash awfully with the soy sauce I liked adding on afterwards): I don't think I came across herbs and spices til I went to uni. And garlic was most definitely out of the question! She also likes her food bone dry, so roasts would be served almost dehydrated. I did get gravy, but she had to be taught (not taking it herself) that using beef granules to put over a roast chicken dinner wasn't that pleasant!

She's very keen on pudding and can't have a meal (lunch or dinner) without. Naturally, these are mainly low fat yoghurts or the like. I remember her asking me a few years back what I'd have for pudding, and was horrified when I said we didn't. The only time we do is on Sundays, after roast (and maybe Monday if there's any left over).

My style of food is completely different to hers. I've kept a fully-stocked herb and spices cupboard for many years, for a start, and switched to real oils and fats a long time ago. Plus, you can never have too much garlic! I suppose another important difference is that I enjoy cooking so can be bothered to spend time on it, it's not a chore like it is to my mother.

I was born in the late sixties. Both my parents were excellent cooks and we did have pasta etc but very often it was meat/veg based meals and snacks were a real treat. Eating out was very rare, there just weren't family restaurants like Pizza Express or lovely cafes on every corner. Both sets of grandparents were very big on not spoiling your appetite.

My mum was constantly dieting from the eighties onwards and I think that was really bad for me. I definitely remember the F plan Diet and lots of copies of slimmers world

70s/80s child here. Mum worked FT but still cooked, quite adventurous (pasta/curries/garlic bread etc). However she was somewhat obsessed with health foods, our homemade brown bread was awful and ensured that I only ate white for the first 20 years of my adult life. Crispy pancakes and frozen pizza crept in in small amounts (under pressure from us children I suspect). I was also allowed to buy crisps on the way to school for my packed lunch (5p!).

My issue longer term with this is that while I can commit to the 8 weeks of not eating cakes etc, I love baking, especially with the DCs, love making cakes to take to work on my birthday and trying those other people make etc. I don't gorge on sweet stuff, never have and consider that the amounts of those things I ate previously were perfectly reasonable (maybe a biscuit or piece of cake once a week, same for sweets, occasional ice cream when out in summer). So I think I will probably allow myself to go back to occasional cakes etc after the 8 weeks.

However bread/crackers etc and crisps are my biggest vice. Those are the thing I should keep off indefinitely as I have no willpower at all once I start on those, I could live on toast quite happily. So that is where I will need to put my effort and not beat myself up about the occasional cake.

Artic roll, remember that too? Ice cream in a Swiss roll
Thinking and reading about the food we ate and how we ate got me thinking about diets in the 60s and 70s and 80s
My mum got pills from the doctor to lose weight, I think they suppressed your appetite and hyped her up so she was full of emery. I think they must have had speed in them. She ended up with thyroid problems as a result.
John Judkin’s book came out in the 70’s telling us sugar was the cause of weight gain and ill health and it was virtually derided and suppressed by nutritionist and we were told that fat was the culprit not sugar.

Speaking of the dreaded sugar I’ve slept really badly last night not being able to sleep and waking up when I did doze off with restless leg syndrome. I’ve not had it so much since I’ve been doing this woe . I wondered if it was that I had blueberries in yogurt and cream with my dinner last night and it sent me a bit hyped up? That’s the only thing that I can think might have caused it.

We still have arctic roll occasionally, DS was introduced to it on a school residential .

I've found it hard not to nibble berries - there was a punnet in the kitchen yesterday and I ate a few without really thinking. I was also picking raspberries in the garden and ate some of those without thinking too

Lots of really interesting discussion here about our historical attitudes to food. Coincidentally I have been musing on this over the past few months anyway after coming across the website Eat like a normal person which has prompted me to examine where my attitudes to food came from.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s. My mum was a great cook and baker and there was always shortbread, scones, tablet in the house. But she was also obsessed with weight. She was constantly on a diet. She did everything - Rosemary Connelly, Cambridge Diet, skipping meals (often just had a bowl of cereal instead of dinner). I got sent to a nutritionist at age 8/9 to try and lose weight as I was apparently overweight. I remember feeling enormous, like Bessie Bunter enormous. It's a family 'joke' that they had to put a lock on the fridge to stop me raiding it. So I was apparently a greedy, fat child. But photos from the time tell a different story. From reading that website I have started to wonder if I was actually not being given enough to eat as a child - I remember feeling a failure because I was hungry. So no wonder I grew up as an emotional eater, and my weight has ballooned on many occasions, I have spent the majority of my adult life restarting the diet, feeling guilty every single time I ate anything 'non-diet; - ie almost every day. My family made it clear that when I was bigger I was an embarrassing disappointment (and being selfish by causing them to worry).

I have been eating this way for several years so I feel it's definitely a WOL for me, I wont go back to eating processed carbs with every meal. It's helped me massively with my emotional eating and food guilt, previously a constant companion, doesn't feature much. Family unsurprisingly haven't exactly embraced it - first Christmas dinner there were lots of comments about 'Auntie Pony's mad diet'. They still ask me every time I go for Sunday dinner 'do you want the pastry with the steak pie?' or 'are you having cake and ice cream?' as if after three years of saying no I might have changed my mind But I let them get on with it now and I eat what I want. My mum is still constantly dieting, her fridge is low-fat central, and I get the feeling that the fact I have lost weight through eating cream, fatty meat and lots of fat etc doesn't sit well with her. Any comments about me losing weight seem a bit grudging!

That was a bit of a rant but very cathartic!

Oncewaswho

I've been really good with food this week, but I have had alcohol. A few vodka sodas last night and quite a lot of fizzy wine the night before. Friday night was a long planned evening with a friend and Saturday was just habit. I will try harder next week.

I'm really craving salad today. I think I'll have spinach, celery, bacon, chicken and avocado. Does that sound ok?

I was born in the late 70s. Mother was a SAHM and cooked everything from scratch. We ate lots of cake but it was all home made. It was eaten as a meal though, not as a snack (they weren't allowed). We would have a hot lunch then sandwiches / cake / scones etc at tea time. We were very active children as we lived on a farm. Mother cooked and baked eveything but she was a bit highly strung and didn't have time (or inclination) to teach us so I taught myself to cook at uni. We didn't have take away apart from fish and chips once a year when the fair came to town. I remember McDonald's opening in our local big town - we begged for ages to go. They eventually took us and none of us could eat it as it was so disgusting - but food wastage was a big no-no so we ate it tearfully whilst being scowled at!!
We were all a healthy weight and so we're all our school friends. Then I went to boarding school. It was a convent. In retrospect it was a very abusive environment. It was also run on a shoe string and we were always hungry. At least once a week we had spaghetti bolognese. It consisted of plain spaghetti with a bottle of (cheap) ketchup stirred into it. Everyone was thin. Luckily the school closed down. It closed half way through my GCSEs so we were the first girls at the local boys school. Cooked breakfasts! Cooked lunch! Low tea = cake and sandwiches! High tea = another cooked meal! And every house had toasters with what seemed like an unlimited supply of bread and butter! I gained a lot of weight.... it was so nice to have food! And the convent years had the effect of making me hoard food, eat everything on my plate and panic at the first sign of hunger. I also have a bit of a wobble if I see a nun and I'm nearly 40!!
As for socially obligated sugar consumption - I think people want others to join in so they don't feel bad about their decision to eat it. I also think sometimes they feel like non-partakers are judging them for eating cake. So they cajole and bully or mock. My MiL will no longer eat pudding or cake in my company. She says it makes her feel "bad". I constantly say I don't crave it or want it and I made if for you and everyone else so please enjoy it. She says I'm spoiling it for everyone. It's because if she refused she'd be miserable and refuses to accept that I am not. She now rarely eats with us because of the "atmosphere". It's entirely in her head. Can't win. Sorry I'm feeling a bit ranty today.... Period looming and I must confess that despite eating LC for a long time the few days before a period are when I do crave something carby.

Ok, I had cut bread/potato/rice etc out about two weeks ago and then saw this. From a serial dieter I'm finding it difficult to completely change my thinking about what to eat, but think I'm getting there. Any comments on where I can improve welcome...
Yesterday was
B Left over cauliflower pizza with chicken, chorizo and green pepper topping
L green pepper salad
D chicken and veg kebab (no pitta)

I'm going to do some bulk cooking for the week today, mushroom soup, cauliflower cheese, celeriac bravas (thanks for your recipes). One question does anyone freeze cauliflower mash as my husband cooks during the week and I'm trying to make adaptions for me as easy as possible. Thanks everyone, I'm finding this thread really helpful ❤️

Any idea what the carb content of this jerk seasoning is likely to be like? Dh marinated the pork belly I bought in it when I wasn't looking. Shall I wash my portions off? He probably used about a desert spoon (40g?)

The sugar is the second last ingredient on the list - well after salt and pepper. Since an ingredient list is in order of weight, I would think you'd be fine with that jerk seasoning.

I wouldn't worry now that it's on there. But that's just me. I suppose you could wash it off your pieces if you wanted to be sure. It is likely to be on the high side for sugar content.

My NSV for today is that I made banana and peanut butter pancakes for my fiancé and I didn't sneak even one tiny bite to taste.

I found a really good tuna pâté in M&S. It was 1.9 gr carbs per 100g (or per pot? Not entirely sure) and was so delicious. I had it on celery sticks but I think it'd be even nicer on cucumber slices.