Unsweetened, please.

Back in December of 2008, faced with a waistline that had slowly expanded to the point that I was on the verge of either developing an overlap or buying new pants, I decided that the time had come to shed some excess pounds. I knew that the process would not be easy; although I'd been able to tolerate the kind of self-starvation regime that's usually promoted by our benighted medical and nutritional establishments for such purposes, I was less than thrilled about doing it. Instead, I decided to engage in an intuitively attractive alternative.

I stopped consuming anything that contained high fructose corn syrup, and reduced my intake of sugar in other forms as much as was easy and simple. Period. No sudden increase in exercise, no counting calories, no rice-cake-and-low-fat-cottage-cheese lunches, no prepackaged meals of questionable virtue, NOTHING ELSE out of the ordinary.

And in the following 9 months to a year, I dropped about 30 pounds, slowly and painlessly.

Along about that time, a friend of mine (who'd been afflicted with a multitude of ailments that caused him to be on a daily diet of pharmaceuticals that would have bankrupted someone with my income) was diagnosed with the early stages of diabetes. The immediate response of his physician at the time was to prescribe yet more drugs in addition to those that he was already taking...and when he looked up their side effects in the Physician's Desk Reference, he had a fit. The stuff was next to deadly. After confirming his suspicions via second and third opinions rendered by professional contacts he trusted, he went looking for a new doctor...and found one whose approach to the situation, after reviewing *all* of the meds he was on, was to stop all of them and let his condition stabilize before evaluating which, if any, of the meds would be continued. To control the effects of the diabetes in this period, a limit of 30 grams of total carbohydrate intake per day was imposed. (Before the discovery and synthesis of insulin, this was the only practical treatment for diabetes...and it worked just fine for most.)

If you've never tried to limit your carb intake, I will point out that the bun for a typical hamburger has more than 30 grams of carbs. If you've ever shopped for low-carb prepared food items in most of the parts of a typical grocery store, you'll understand why meeting his new limit was not easy, but it wasn't something my friend felt that he had a lot of choice about, so he started eating a lot more meat and non-starch vegetables. To his immense surprise, in a couple of weeks, it was like he was a different person. Nearly all of his long-term maladies had either vanished or dropped in severity to a tolerable point and were still abating. He'd started losing weight (something he'd never been able to do previously at all) and his stamina and appearance had both improved. The change was remarkable...and although he was sure that the cessation of all of the conflicting drugs had played a large part in the changes, he was still very curious indeed about just what part the low-carb diet might be playing.

What he found out was enlightening, infuriating, and promising.

It was enlightening because he discovered that the low-carb lifestyle was neither hazardous nor unhealthy, as was loudly proclaimed by certain parts of the medical establishment, and was, in fact, far healthier overall than the dietary regime that was followed by anyone who adhered to the "official" guidelines.

It was infuriating because he discovered that there was a large, powerful and entrenched establishment within the medical and nutritional fields which refused to accept the valid, persuasive and conclusive research that demonstrated the fallacy of promoting a high-carb diet (such as the one he'd been following unintentionally for decades) as being healthy in any regard.

And it was promising, at a personal level, because some of the the results he'd already seen appeared to be just the tip of a beneficial iceberg that had been appearing through the fog of misinformation as he delved deeper into the subject.

When I related to him that I'd been able to shed much of my excess weight via the simple expedient of nixing everything that contained HFCS and a lot of sugar, he was understandably not surprised. Over the subsequent months, he shared some information he'd collected along the way which caused me to add starches to my proscription list, and which persuaded me to increase the amount of fatty meats I consumed. My weight loss accelerated, and other benefits started to appear. My stamina improved, my allergies became less troublesome, and my blood pressure (which had been a bit high, but never dangerously so) started to fall back very slowly.

When I started this, I weighed over 210 lbs, which was far from being considered obese for someone who's 6'3" tall. Today, I appear to have stabilized at around 163 lbs, I have lost 5 inches off my waistline, and I feel much better on a daily basis than I did when I was carrying the extra pounds around. By many standards, I am now considered underweight for my height. Well, the folks who think so can just keep their opinions to themselves. This is working really well for me, and I'm sticking to it.

Meanwhile, for anyone who's actively curious about the subject, I can heartily recommend "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes as a long but exceptionally informative read that covers not only the facts and the history of how we got into the dietary mess we're in, but why there's so much information around which is dead wrong...and what that misinformation is still causing as a result.