FCAS: My "Crash" Diet

ven though my microbiomic samples are still filtering through Viome's complex analyzation process, in anticipation of doing a third sample—to find out how my greatly modified diet is standing the test of time—I will be sticking to this reduced fat, carbs-and-sugar diet, which I've dubbed FCAS (pronounced "EF-Cass," in a nod to that Boeing 737 MAX nose-into-ground software, MCAS, or "EM-Cass").

FCAS is my friend, and it should be your friend, though hopefully with the "Reduced" always in front of it (because Lord knows, most of my life like my Boeing friends I strove mightily to place "MAX" in front of it).

Adhering to my "simple is better" worldview, my diet is composed primarily of the four major food groups for vegetarians: vegetables, nuts, legumes and chocolate.

As a lacto- ovo- pesky-vegetarian (the last meaning I can eat fish), the only animal I'm including for now is shrimp, although when I start branching out I'll start with chicken and maybe later meringue, but all that will only happen after I see my first microbiomic results.

The way I see it, the main demon perching on my shoulder with the most vested interests in my progress is the Sugar Demon, a fact I recognized as long as five years ago in a now-defunct blog.

As I'm sure you all know by now—as Sauron was to Mordor, Ancel Keys was to the keeper of the Sugar Flame—sugar in your diet does not always come wrapped in little pretty foil wraps or in 1.5-Megaliters of Mountain Dew.

It more frequently comes in that mound of home fries or bowl of rice . . . your liver does not know the difference, and furthermore, doesn't give a shit (although your colon will beg to disagree).

So I had to give up my two favourite foods: rice and pasta; with potatoes and bread just falling all over themselves to get to the top of my food pyramid.

This, my friends, is like a crime against living; at least, to me it was. Deprived of my late-night Delverde Linguine Fini with my favourite Japanese pasta sauce, or a huge dish of scalloped potatoes or a thick slice of cracked wheat toast and Bonne Maman Confiture de fraises, not to mention the nightly dessert feasts of ice cream with strawberries and nuts and whipped cream . . . all . . . gone with no possibility of return . . . well, that's just a crime, folks.

But as usual, we think of these things as isolated events. I'll go back to my regular no-ice cream diet soon. Today's splurge was just today. It won't hurt.

But when that's what you say, every day, well, it will hurt.

It's been now exactly two weeks since I went on my Reduced FCAS regimen, and what can I say? My blood sugar has normally been around 7.0 mmol/L/126 mg/dL and yesterday I got out of the car and felt a strange sensation, as if my pants were falling down! But my pants were falling down!

My new FCAS routine, crafted over these past two weeks, has been relatively easy to adopt, and barring the occasional lapse—allowed by any sane diet counsellor—will never result in a failure like its relative, the MCAS . . .

The message here at BiomeMechanic II is So Far, SO GOOD.

Back To Regularly Scheduled Programming . . ?

My debts

an a new diet actually . . . end? Think back on the last time you tried to consciously change the way you ate. Maybe you decided to become a vegetarian. Hmm . . . didn't end well, eh? Was it the tofurkey?

Or maybe, just maybe, you were a little more ambitious. Huh? What could be more ambitious than giving up meat?

" . . . !"

Umm, okay, well, I never said I was giving up all sugar. Just, y'know, that white stuff you sprinkle over your steak. Oh, you don't sprinkle sugar on your steak?

Right.

So it became day 13 of the two-week Carbohydrate Minimisation Project (F.*.C.K.) and I had gone through the low-carb bread—which I wouldn't feed to pigeons—the no-added sugar jam (a Level IV biohazard) and the sugarless latte (yecch).

On Day 13 (yesterday) I went ahead and did the second Viome sample (they received my first one and are processing, and there's an incredible sale on that ends tonight!) and started planning for the return to my old diet.


But what exactly did that mean?

That meant: having copious amounts of full-sugar jam on my well-buttered toast in the morning (4 teaspoons of sugar in every serving) and honey in my tea (1 teaspoon of sugar.)

Lunch was usually seven or so Honeycrisp apples (yes, and I could have had 8 if they weren't so expensive)(33—thirty-three teaspoons of sugar!).

Then dinner, invariably something like pasta (not itself full of sugar but treated by the body as sugar—let's say 10 teaspoons) and then dessert: two hefty scoops of ice cream with lots of little sprinklies: 12 teaspoons of sugar.

That all adds up to a whopping 60 (sixty) teaspoons of sugar a day . . . every single day.

In my case during my regular eating routines I was actually trying to avoid sugar—you should have seen what things were like before I began eating apples! KitKat bars for lunch . . . need I say more?

So reducing from seven apples to three a day is not such an existential stretch.

But is two weeks enough time to remove an old routine—years old, in my case—and introduce an entirely different routine?

The short answer is: Yes. It's more than enough time. Deciding to switch from KitKat bars to apples can be done; I'm living proof.

As far as ditching white rice, pasta and white bread, well, it's hard, but it also can be done.

Reducing portions is easy (or at least it was for me). Eating in restaurants can be controlled. Avoid fast food whenever possible, but if it isn't possible, order water and ice, as those are two foods whose calorie counts the fast food people can't disguise.

From now on, unless I go through some miraculous climbdown and suddenly decide five nights in a row of white pasta is okay, I'm going to limit my carboniferous content.

Not to the extent of being a Ketoist, mind you, but a pesco-ovo-lactotarian.

That's Greek for Holy fuck, can this diet business actually be over?

But the chorus from the Microbiome is: Not yet, pal, not yet!

And it's true. We all await the results from Viome.