Yep – I owe it all to Jimmy Buffett. My low-carb story began at a Jimmy Buffett concert. It was The Bama Breeze Tour in Foxboro, MA in 2007. As you would expect at a pre-concert tailgate event, there were plenty of sugary snacks and beverages to be had (including these really awesome cheeseburger cookies that I spent HOURS making!). At some point shortly before the concert started, I realized that my husband was no longer around. After a bit of searching I eventually found him in the front seat of the car, nearly passed out (and he had not been drinking alcohol). It was hot so we hydrated him up and he gradually felt well enough to attend the concert.

Following several visits to his doctor and some tests which included a glucose tolerance test (measuring blood glucose after a sugar load), he was diagnosed with “hypoglycemia.” He was also told this could be a precursor to diabetes, especially in light of his strong family history of diabetes. He was told to eat more frequent meals and more carbohydrates to make sure his glucose level stayed up. Well, it wasn’t long before his weight started climbing and he began to feel even worse. He was sleeping more than usual and feeling more fatigued. This clearly wasn’t working.

At that point I decided to start doing my own research. I was going to do everything in my power to make sure my husband didn’t become diabetic. Despite having been through nursing school, medical school and many years of practice, I never really learned the truth (and the fiction) about nutrition and how the current recommendations for (at that time) a low-fat diet came about. I needed to understand the science and the evidence behind it.

It happened that a new book had just been released around that time called Good Calories, Bad Calories by science journalist Gary Taubes. It wasn’t exactly an easy read, but it was the most education I have ever had about nutrition and how our dietary guidelines were based on flawed and inaccurate assumptions. I continued to read every book on the subject that I could find and kept finding the same conclusions – there is NO evidence that healthy dietary fat causes disease and the real cause of diabetes and other chronic disease is sugar.

And so it began. I introduced this idea to my husband and his comment was “as long as it tastes good, honey.” So I cleaned the pantry and fridge of all sugar. This was all-or-nothing. From that moment on we eliminated all sugar and grains from our diet. The result was dramatic. Within a few weeks were were both feeling better and losing weight, LOTS of weight) all without ever counting a calorie.

It has been a journey – and I continue to read and absorb everything I can find including new books, new studies, podcasts, and websites. I want to share all that i have learned about low-carb cooking and eating and so I created Tastefully Unrefined. We eventually evolved into a ketogenic diet many years later based on other events in our lives. But that’s another story…