Chocolate Almond Butter Bombs

I had lost 50 pounds on a low carb diet and plateaued. I joined a gym and after a year, I gained 10 pounds. Yes, I’m sure most of it was muscle, but it’s not the direction I was intending to go. It was suggested to me to log all of my food intake using a tool like MyFitnessPal. I was reluctant since, quite frankly, I viewed it as a pain in the ass. Since I didn’t have any other ideas, I started logging everything I ate as meticulously as possible. I was shocked how many carbohydrates (and calories) I was consuming in a day. Yes, I was eating lots of low carb foods like pistachios, but I was sometimes polishing off half a bag in a day. I knew I had to make changes and fix my macro-nutrient ratios. I needed ideas for doing a “fat fast” to kickstart my weight loss again, so I purchased Dana Carpender’s Fat Fast Cookbook: 50 Easy Recipes to Jump Start Your Low Carb Weight Loss. It has lots of great recipes that are 80% - 88% fat. One of these recipes helped change my life: Chocolate Peanut Butter Bombs. With the introduction of these little babies (after a few modifications), I was able to melt off another 50+ pounds.

Cauliflower Fried “Rice” Made Easy

I love cauliflower. It’s an extremely versatile ingredient and can be very tasty. Discovering new ways to incorporate cauliflower into meals becomes a necessity when living a low carb lifestyle. Most people remember the foul smelling cruciferous vegetable when their parents forced them to eat it as a child and never bother to learn how to prepare it properly. (Same with Brussels sprouts, broccoli, kale, spinach, etc.) One of my favorites is using cauliflower as a rice replacement. Chinese fried rice, in particular. Let’s first discuss a few cooking techniques for making traditional Chinese fried rice.

A weirdly, improbably effective cognitive enhancer and treatment for Parkinson’s, ADHD, Tourette’s, and schizophrenia...and weight loss.

Carbohydrate restriction has been identified as a preventative action and potential treatment for a variety of neurological disorders and weight loss. But if you guessed that’s the subject of this post, you’d be wrong.

I recently read the book “Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power” by Dan Hurley. It’s an interesting tale of self experimentation to improve human cognitive function. The author reviews a number of methods such as mental training tasks, diet, and drugs and implements a few of them to see if his IQ can be improved through these means. You’re probably now predicting that I will be discussing his dietary findings as they relate to cognitive function, but you’d again be wrong. Instead, I’m going to focus on drugs; one drug in particular. I’m singling this one out because it’s controversial. Its infamy is due to guilt-by-association, kind of like saturated fat. You’d think this demonstrably effective, inexpensive, all-natural, non-habit forming drug would be getting more attention as a potential treatment especially for older folks at risk for dementia, but it probably won’t in my lifetime. It’s nicotine. The demon ingredient that is alleged to make people slaves to cigarettes may be more effective than prescription drugs.

Low Carb Amaretto Ice Cream

A friend of mine had given me bottles of amaretto and kahlúa Da Vinci sugar free syrup many years ago. It was before I knew about low carb, so I stuck them in my liquor cabinet and forgot about them. I discovered them recently and wondered if I could use them in ice cream. Liquor based ice creams are nothing new. In fact, I was planning to make one, but the sugar content of most liquors makes it prohibitive. These sugar free syrups are perfect since they provide the flavor without any of the carbs (or calories).

Low Carb Gluten Free Cookies and Cream Ice Cream

This ice cream flavor was the inspiration for me to tackle Low Carb Oreo Cookies. They were originally just a means to an end, since I wasn’t sure I’d succeed in an Oreo clone that would stand up on its own. Fortunately, they taste good as a snack and work beautifully as an ice cream additive. The idea of crushing up Oreos and adding them to ice cream dates back to somewhere around the 1970’s. “Cookies and Cream” quickly shot up into the top five ice cream flavors by 1983 (allegedly).

Low Carb Gluten Free Oreo Cookies

My next ice cream idea is for Cookies and Cream. It’s basically a sweet cream base with Oreo cookies added. Oreos are hardly low carb, so either I have to find an off the shelf replacement or make my own. Atkins used to make an Oreo clone called “Atkins Endulge Chocolate Creme Sandwich Cookies.” They tasted good, but they caused stomach upset and were mostly made from wheat flour. If there was ever an Atkins product that stretched the idea of “low carb,” it was this one. That's probably why it’s been discontinued.

Comparing two MD5 files

Using md5sum to compare single files is easy to do and straightforward. Working with multiple files recursively in directories isn’t straightforward. Creating an md5 file of a directory path can be accomplished by:

find ./path -exec md5sum -b '{}' \; > output.md5

But how do you compare the contents of two different output files? This short Perl script will compare two md5sum outputs and report the old, new, and changed files in a new file called diff.txt. Keep in mind that if the path of identical files are different, they will be interpreted as old/new.