Ecofrugality versus carb counting

This week, my life got a lot more complicated. Especially where food is concerned.

As I've mentioned here before, I've been making an effort lately to control my carb intake. My doctor advised me to avoid sugar and other low-fiber carbs and to balance out carbohydrates with protein and healthy fats, and I've been diligently following this advice. But after several months of this, my blood sugar was higher than it had been when I started. So she told me to see a nutritionist, and the nutritionist told me that I was going to have to start actually counting carbs. From now on—and, apparently, for the rest of my life—I have to make sure I don't consume more than 30 grams of carbohydrates at a meal or 15 grams for a snack. And on top of that, I'm supposed to balance out carb-rich foods at every meal with an equal volume of protein-rich food and, for lunch and dinner, double the volume of non-starchy vegetables. (I'm allowed occasional cheat meals, but not more than once a week.)

Add all of this to my preference for humane and low-carbon foods, and planning every meal has now become a puzzle with lots of pieces. And it's got me wondering: is it even possible to eat ecofrugally on a carbohydrate budget?

Back when I did the SNAP Challenge, one of the conclusions I reached was that a low-budget diet was heavy on grains and light on meat. And conveniently for me, a low-carbon diet was exactly the same, since plant-based foods have a much lower carbon footprint per pound than animal foods. But now, this type of diet is exactly what I'm not supposed to eat. The dietician gave me a list of carb-heavy foods I need to limit my intake of, and it includes most of the foods that used to form the bulk of my diet. Brown rice, whole-wheat pasta, quinoa, all kinds of beans, potatoes, popcorn, all kinds of fruit, even winter squash—all these foods I used to think were good for me are now "bad" foods that need to be rationed.

Meanwhile, a separate list shows the protein-rich foods I need to get more of. And they're nearly all animal products: eggs, chicken, turkey, pork, fish, shellfish, beef, lamb, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese. I can count beans and lentils toward my protein requirements for a given meal, but since they also count toward my carb quota, I can't eat more than a cup of them. She also listed plant-based protein powder as an option, but holy cow, have you seen how much that stuff costs? The brand she recommended, Nuzest, is $26 for 20 servings, and as far as I can tell, that's one of the most affordable options. I found some recipes for homemade protein powders, but they were all too high in carbs; for balancing out my carb intake, they'd be no better than beans or lentils, and considerably more expensive. Pretty much the only ecofrugal options on the list were eggs, tofu, and possibly some varieties of fish.

So it looks like I'm going to have to dial back my attempts to make my diet more plant-based. Replacing dairy milk with soy milk or almond milk is okay (in fact, the unsweetened varieties of both have fewer carbs than milk), but I'm certainly going to have to add back in at least some animal products. For instance, according to the recipe calculator at My Fitness Pal, our favorite vegan mozzarella has 10 grams of carbs and only 3 grams of protein per serving, so we'll have to go back to real mozzarella if we want it to serve as a protein source. And eggs, fish, and free-range chicken are all likely to play a much larger role in our diet moving forward.

These choices aren't that bad in terms of their carbon and water footprints, but they're all really expensive right now. The free-range chicken legs at Trader Joe's have skyrocketed from $2 to $6 per pound, and even the whole free-range chicken at Lidl is $4.50 per pound—nearly $25 for a 5.5-pound bird. Free-range eggs, which we used to find at Lidl for around $2.40 per dozen, have not been available there for weeks, and the best price we could find anywhere else was $3.50 per dozen. Fresh fish and seafood ranges from $5 to $15 per pound. 

Fortunately, I do have one big advantage: a husband who is willing to cook and bake for me. The changes Brian has already made to his bread and cookie recipes have made these foods considerably lighter in carbs than the standard versions. According to my "carbohydrate portions" handout, most breads have about 15 grams of carbs per slice, but when I entered his homemade fiber-rich bread (similar to this recipe, but with some adjustments in the proportions) into the calculator at My Fitness Pal, it came out to just 7 grams for a small slice. That means I can eat up to three slices for breakfast and still have 9 grams of carbs left over for a cup of (sweetened) soy milk in my cocoa. Likewise, his low-sugar chocolate chip cookies have just 6 grams of carbs each, so I can still enjoy one or even two of them for a snack (provided I supplement them with some extra protein.) But to work these miracles, he's had to invest in a lot of pricey ingredients like almond flour and flaxseed and a variety of low-carb sweeteners like stevia and xylitol, all of which jacks up our food bill still more.

But Brian is rising to the challenge.  In the the five days since I was given these new orders, he has plunged headlong into the low-carb fray. He adapted his cabbage and Soy Curl sausage recipe to achieve the proper balance of cabbage to soy to carbs (apples and roasted potatoes). He invented a new "hash" of eggs and green veggies, which we ate with his homemade bread. He dismantled a whole chicken, turning the thighs and drumsticks into our favorite Chicken and Rhubarb Sauce (accompanied by polenta and a large green salad) and the bones into stock. When the green leaf lettuce we bought for the salad proved to be rather tough and bitter, he perked up the leftover leaves by topping them with a new variation on vegan caprese. And even as I write this, he's constructing a chicken pot pie with an almond flour crust, using all the little extra bits of meat he strained out of the stock.

In short, eating ecofrugal on a carb budget is likely to be the biggest challenge I've taken up yet. It's already proving much harder to adjust to than the SNAP Challenge, the Live the Wage Challenge, or the Rationing Challenge—and unlike any of those, it's not something I can just wash my hands of at the end of a week. But on the plus side, that means if at first I don't succeed, I can try, try again. Rather than declaring it a failure, I can keep at it as long as necessary to make it a success.