My wife is the devil. Well, maybe not the head hadean honcho himself, but… She gave me Godiva chocolates for Valentine’s Day!
It was a little box, just four pieces, but it’s not like I’m on a regular simple calorie counting diet where I could just work them in somehow. I’m doing low carb. Candy isn’t on the diet. Or is it?
In the induction phase, you stick below 20 grams of carbs a day. I really haven’t been counting. I’ve just tried to avoid any meals that have more than 5 grams for the meal, except for the carbs from vegetables. For example, tonight I had a couple of hotdogs, some mustard, and some sliced tomato (while my son had a hotdog in a bun, ketchup, sliced tomato, and about 1/3 of a bag of Cheetos, washing them all down with 2% lowfat milk). The hotdogs had a carb gram each. I didn’t bother to factor the carbs in the tomato.
Onion carbs, tomato carbs, celery carbs… I’m not counting them. I’m just not driving myself that crazy. It’s not like I gorge myself on them. Anyway, as I said before, I’m finding a middleground between Atkins and South Beach that makes sense for me. And South Beach’s “phase I” (the phase that’s like Atkin’s “induction phase”) is a lot more forgiving of veggies and the carbs they’ve got locked up in their fibrous walls. Technically, tomato is a fruit, but so is avocado. You can have my avocado when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
That reminds me, I ought to make some guacamole next week…
But back to candy, specifically Godiva chocolates. I looked at the nutritional info on the box and the serving size was the whole 4-piece box. It had 210 calories, but only 24 grams of carbs with 2 grams of fiber. If I just had 2 pieces (and fed the other two to my wife), it was a 105 calorie snack with just maybe 12 grams of carbs.
Thank god for all the fat in chocolate… and for the fact that it makes you absorb the carbs more slowly. Any of you who are hypoglycemic or diabetic know, if you need a quick sugar hit to raise a low blood sugar, chocolate is not recommended because the fat will slow the absorption of the sugar. You should drink a sugary beverage or crunch a few lollipops.
The fact is that this approximately 105 calories worth of Godiva chocolates, when looked at from the angle of how it impacts your blood sugar, is better for you than one of those 100-calorie packs of Oreo thin crisps. Yes, you’re getting more fat, but you’re getting fewer carbs and the fat is slowing their absorption. That 100-calorie pack is hitting your blood glucose significantly harder.
I ate the chocolates around 2 hours after dinner. So it was time to take my blood sugar measurements anyway. I then took readings at 50 minutes and 2 hours after. At 50 minutes after eating the chocolates, my blood glucose had gone up 5 points. Two hours after eating the chocolates, my blood glucose was only 1 point above where it was right before I ate them.
And I realized, if I’d taken in maybe 13 or 14 grams of carbs today, the two pieces of chocolate put me all of 5 grams over my daily total, or to the daily total a strict Atkins diet would be setting for me on Monday as I completed “induction” and began slowly phasing in carbs again.
So, was it truly a cheat? If you go by how far it pushed me outside of my daily goals… not really. And that’s basically what a lot of diets try to help us understand: we can eat the foods we want, just not a lot.
The trick is to remodel our perceptions of what constitutes “a lot” because the food industry often packages enough calories into a single “meal” to sustain an adult bull elephant for a day. But that’s a post for another night.
Happy St. Valentine’s day to you all. A hug to everyone and kisses for a few of you (on the cheek… I am married, you know).
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