 Whether you're just starting or you're a veteran of the low-carb carnivore world like us, you can never shake the memories of a high-carbohydrate world. Hey there, njroute22.com here with another low-carb carnivore keto chat. This is take number two, FYI, and here's a little tech tip. If you're using a wires like the microphone, like this one, always put fresh batteries in when you start a new session, even if you thought you put new batteries in the day before or what have you, I shot a whole long session and it had zero audio and that makes me mad because the second take never is, it was really good too. But I'm gonna have to hear to talk about my nine most memorable moments in my standard American diet and high-carb world. And I went on and on about the three things that make the foods addictive, like the texture, like the crunch of a carbohydrate food, a chip or a bread or the chew cannot be replicated when you're low-carb. So don't even do it. And the same same goes for the taste. Everybody mistakes something that they think tastes good, but when it's just a chemical reaction basically in your body that creates this feeling of pleasure and you associate it with the taste. It's really, that's not the case in our opinion. But anyway, we have some high-carbohydrate memories that we'll never forget. And luckily because we've weathered the storm of failure and going long bouts, eating the wrong foods and not understanding the high-carb and low-carb differentials. But we're now, I think, in the clear when it comes to making those mistakes again. But one of our worst offenders was pizza. Back in the day when I was eating the standard American diet, I would eat pizza pies from any kind of pizza parlor, whether it was Domino's or the great Italian, standard Italian New York style pizza or the brick oven pizzas from those, you know, I loved pizza more than anything. It was definitely the carbs in the pizza and I would eat them. I would shovel the damn pizza in my mouth. I would stuff myself to the gills. It was the worst. I can't imagine eating that much food today. I would feel sick. I would throw up and I hardly ever have thrown up in my entire life. Same goes for the potato chips and any kind of bags of chips. You walk, they have entire aisles filled with bags of chips. And, you know, you associate that with the crunch like a tortilla chip and dips and cheeses and all sorts of powdered flavorings. You can't, you would just sit there and mindlessly eat chips. And that's something I just, I've made the mistake, you know, we had a period here, maybe a two-year period where one member of my family was gluten-free and we would get all these gluten-free chips in the house and I would dive into them every now and then I had a period, a two-year period, where I put on a significant amount of weight after reaching a really nice low level and it went, phew, after eating these gluten-free garbage. But, and the same goes for bread. Any bread, it doesn't matter if it's 90 grain bread that tastes like a frickin' brick or like usual Wonder Bread or a white Italian hero roll. Bread, bread, we've made the mistake of tasting it and never again. I don't want to feel that way so, but I still remember the the sensation of a sandwich or a nice sesame seed bun on a nice delicious hamburger. Bread, for us, was a fun thing but we don't want to feel bad so we don't do it anymore. And then sweets. I've talked about this quite a bit. I think the sweet sensation in general, even if it's a good sweet like erythritol or xylitol or monk fruit, is not something that the human mind or body is ready to deal with in mass quantity. Commercially processed sweets. So, and then includes like the grain-based desserts like cakes and cookies and donuts and I never really liked pie. I never, I hated pie. But, but donuts, you know, like a Boston cream donuts, cream puffs, those things. You know, we still have memories of eating a nice seven-layer cake and also dairy-based sweets like ice cream. And that's why we're running into these problems with these low carb ice creams now. And they're not affecting our weight and they don't make us hungry but there's something about that sweet sensation that I am striving to avoid. And then that's, I'm kind of stuck on these crook and marker drinks too. They have erythritol and they're exceedingly sweet. And when I make a drink now, I'll use a quarter can, 85 grams of this just for sweetness. But it's something that it's hard to replicate. If you get like hooked on sweets and you drink something or eat something that's not so sweet, it tastes, the flavor is numbed to some degree. It's muted. And when you, I kept sweets out for a long time and everything started getting enhanced flavor because I wasn't hooked on the sweets. So, and my next thing I kind of have memories of is beverages, especially diet beverages. Diet beverages are the worst. Diet Coke, diet iced tea, diet Snapple, all these drinks were just awful. And I did a post on it earlier about how these gas stations and convenience stores have 9 billion horribly artificially sweetened drinks or sugary drinks. And I'm telling you, man, diet soda is one of the most addictive things you cannot. I might drink 10 or 20 cans of Diet Coke a day back in my worst periods. And now it's just water, coffee with heavy cream and some low carb booze. And another thing that I remember and I still can't, it's ketchup. Ketchup is, it's basically just sugar paste. But, you know, everything was dipped in ketchup. Ketchup was slathered on your burgers and all this stuff. And it wasn't that you liked the burger or the french fries, it's just that the ketchup sort of kept you addicted. It was like your little friend coming with you, your vice. So, we do mustard now. Mustard is relatively low carb and I'll use mustard on my food but not many other condiments. I've been striving to eat the meat alone and enjoy it, eat it slowly, mindfully. And it works. You can do it. Another thing that we used to like was fast food. Go to Burger King, get a Whopper, go to McDonald's, get a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder. Those things were delicious because they were greasy, they tasted good in your mind, they were salty and they had that squishy bun and mayo or whatever the hell, the special sauce they put on it and then you'd get fries or onion rings or whatever the hell else and a lot of times people would end their meal with a fricking apple pie, a deep-fried apple pie which is probably more carbs than I eat in a week. But I remember the taste and it was usually like an addiction and when you took that first bite the addiction was met and then you were mindless for the rest of the time. And this sort of covers a lot of what we already talked about but fried foods were one of my favorite. Deep-fried chicken tenders, you know with that breading on there and whatever you dipped it in honey mustard which is sweet. French fries, I love getting French fries and you know in some places were better than others and you get those mealy ones at some lame-ass diner steak fries. They were called nor-thin fries, curly fries, seasoned fries and onion rings. We love them, the skinny kind, the thick kind, beer battered. I think I talked about this but this long horn steak house has this massive vomit mountain of onion rings. I think it was 1500 calories and 200 grams of carbs and people eat that before dinner as an appetizer which is mind-boggling but it was fun for us to eat these fried foods and once you had that first bite you were addicted and you shoveled and you got fat and you got a stomach ache. Nah, not anymore. I remember what it tastes like, I enjoyed it but I can burn my hamburger a little bit and let the cheese melt down and it gets a similarly fried crispy taste and that that's enough for us. And lastly and this also covers pretty much everything is going out to eat at restaurants. Restaurants were fun. You'd look at the menu maybe you could be daring and try something new. It was usually junky food, carby food and you'd get bread for the appetizer, breadsticks or whatever they gave you. That's what Olive Garden. Everybody goes there and shovels those damn breadsticks down. They probably, wow, they eat that before their meal like five or ten of these stupid breadsticks dipped in marinara sauce and they would eat them and eat them. It was like hundreds of grams of carbs and they'd be gaining weight like literally as they sat there at dinner time. And the thing about restaurants they was always somehow tasted different than cooking at home because they most likely used just the worst cooking oils, vegetable oils and they cook in a shared environment. You don't know what the hell they cooked before. And they might use MSG or other kind of flavor enhancers that make people want to go back to that restaurant. Oh yeah, that was an awesome restaurant. We're going to go back again and eat more. But I have these memories and luckily because we've made mistakes and felt the pain of making those mistakes, they're just memories now. But you can't shake them. They stay with you for a long time. But just be sure, try not to be angry and eat for whatever reason. Some people eat for emotional reasons and that's not good either because then you're just going to fall back into your old bad cycle. So hope you enjoyed my trip down high carb memory lane. Enjoy the rest of your day.