The Divine Low Carb

Food Angst and Holidays

2011-11-19T16:40:00.000-06:00

My aunt should have owned stock in Diet Shasta. She's been dieting with every option she could find since probably around 1969, and she's still morbidly obese--she got fatter over time of course. That's a lot of options and there's a lot of trying and it not working.

Sure, she lost weight. She just regained it of course. See this post on research related to weight regain. Concise summary: "Nearly inevitable." My theory: Moreso the more fat you begin. Caveat: entire amount may not be regained (so, that's something positive).

It is her daughter, my amazingly artistic cousin, who gained weight about as rapidly as I did and ironically at about the same age I did (I never thought of that until just now), and who eventually took up cocaine as the only hope for a solution for her wailing grief and mortified shame about her body. Now she is on the federal prison diet. That didn't end well.

I remember when I was 18 I went to a big celebration of my grandfather's 80th birthday. Family had come from around the country for this, and it was the first and probably the last celebration of its kind. My aunt was frustrated because she wanted to eat some of the food she'd spent 3 days cooking for it -- the smell of garlic bread wafting through the house was knee-weakeningly wonderful. But she was on this diet at the time which was mostly about drinking so much water it's retarded and dangerous.

And... I could tell she felt like everybody might be "thinking" that she "should" be on a diet.

She might be right.

When I was at most 15# overweight (I didn't feel overweight, but I wasn't as thin as is considered proper today), age 19 or so (this is the 80's), I went to my stepmom's parents' house for the Thanksgiving family meal. She has 3 brothers. The entire family (except the brothers, and her at the time) was diabetic. I don't mean borderline. I mean losing eyes and limbs and dying over it eventually. At that time, several people were alive and whole who aren't now, and they were there.

Did anybody make LC versions of anything for them? No. The idea was, it's a special occasion, you stuff yourself on food that will kill you and then use insulin to compensate. Don't get me started on People Killing Their Diabetic Family Members By Making No Efforts To Help Them as that's another rant.

So, we are all eating. I was mostly scarfing down stuffing and white meat turkey which I love, despite it is dry and tasteless, go figure. Everybody else was eating more food than you can believe a person can shovel in. Plate after plate of macaroni salad, potato salad, mashed potatoes and gravy, twice-baked potatoes, brown sugar yams, fruit salad, on and on and on. I was sitting there feeling concern and pity for the fact that these people were diabetic and all the food seemed deadly. I considered eating some yams (love 'em!) but then I saw the dessert table! I decided that I wanted to have some pie instead, so I go get a slice of cherry pie. And I am walking back to my seat with it when her youngest brother eyes me with disdain and says, "Not like you NEED that, you know."

I was mortified. The other brothers laughed. I looked at him in some confusion, because a quick look around the room showed me that aside from those 3 young men, there were only approximately 3 other people in that entire seriously overcrowded house that were NOT fat, more fat, or hugely fat, plus diabetic: that would be ME, my dad, and my stepmom. So why he would say this to ME, when I weighed about 140 or so (~5'6), in that environment, compared to everyone else!, was a total mystery. I ate the pie (after saying something quietly unprintable to him) but I felt horrible then.

So the thing is, maybe people at that family gathering really WERE thinking that my aunt "should have been" on a diet. Maybe she wasn't just paranoid. Maybe she'd lived long enough fat to know what to expect.

It seems to me that this is often the perception people have about anyone fat. It doesn't matter how well you eat, or how much of the time you eat well. If you are eating anything but carrot sticks when they see you, "Well that explains it."

I (thin at the time) said you know, given you've been dieting since I was about 4, and given you are not thin, I think maybe you should take this opportunity to just enjoy the meal you worked so hard on. I mean if this were a one-time focus maybe it would be different, but this is just one day in the middle of 15 years behind and however many years ahead, and I do not think it can be held to blame for your figure.

Journal Trolls

This reminds me of the people who on the internet, will go into someone's journal (I've seen this happen with several forum buddies), ignore that they have been eating nearly impeccably for years, point out the times in their journal that they said they ate "a coconut cookie" or "ten chips with salsa at the restaurant" or whatever, and then say, well it's obvious you just eat like crap so quit whining about being fat.

You know, if someone weighs 350# (let alone more) they are not fat because they ate 10 chips with salsa or a coconut cookie. Most people on an eating plan, averaged over a week, are low enough on carbs and calories both to absorb 'minor' things like that. People do not get and stay fat because they ate 6 cherries when otherwise VLC. That's stupid. We're not talking about major constant violations of eating plan here we're talking about occasional tiny things that were merely unplanned; not even necessarily exceeding their ideal food count totals.

Neurosis and Food

At minor gatherings, like business trips or vacations, I have gotten up and left a shared public table to eat elsewhere, because it was filled with women who the minute they sat down, started rationalizing why it was ok to eat what they were eating because..., or started talking about nothing but fat, food, food that will kill you, disease, etc. If we ever meet and you want to share a meal with me, do not bring up the evil of food, or disease! WTF is wrong with people that they can't just have a freaking meal without such neurosis?

I see it as even metaphysically bad, like cursing your food while you eat it because you're focused on totally negative stuff. I want to tell these people, either eat well or don't, but shut the hell up about it and let other people enjoy their food! I've actually said that before -- more diplomatically of course -- but you will not be surprised to know that people did not like me any better as a result... :-)

I actually feel if you take total responsibility for yourself, oddly you don't have all that guilt because you simply accept that it was your decision to make, you had the right to make it, and that was the result and you will live with the results of your decisions. It's a matter of fact thing.

IMO the great angst is not about 'the decision' but about feeling one didn't really have the RIGHT to make the decision. So people are wringing their hands about what they should have done, even while they are with every bite making the decision over again. When you truly feel your food is your decision to make, you can just make it.

Holiday Food

In major gatherings like holidays, I'm not saying (in the above example with my aunt) that anyone should eat crappy food when they don't want to, or use it as an excuse to blow a good eating plan. Actually I'm very conservative on that point because it's been my experience that "going off-plan for a day" often derails people for six months instead.

I'm just saying that ideally, a person would not do it, and feel fine about not doing it. Or, if they ARE going to eat it either way, then they might as well enjoy themselves. The whole big complex of guilt and shame and longing and sense of unfairness and misery attached to holidays because of food is just crazy.

The best weapon is to eat yourself stuffed on meat/fats before going of course, but failing that, I would much rather a person just ENJOY LIFE if they are going to eat it anyway: being miserable doesn't reduce the carbs at all.

Being so fat and worrying about surviving to see my grandkids has really made me realize how important it is to enjoy the moment. "Life is what is happening while you're making other plans," as that saying goes.

I think for people who are new to LC or who know that they have a problem with carb-up days, clearly holidays breaks aren't the answer. But if the need feels real, you can work on enjoying life by learning to make yourself lowcarb versions of what you feel most deprived of, or alternatives that are yummy, and eat those before going.

A couple years ago my kid wanted to eat carby at Thanksgiving and she was on LC with me. So we came to an agreement: we would make some LC sweet-crunchy-maple pecans, and we would make some "almond joy" LC candy, and she could have some of that instead. It was a decent trade. Beat eating 3 plates of potatoes and more, which she might have otherwise.

I think the psychological element of food is almost worse than some of the health elements.

The Legos of Low-Carb

2011-11-17T16:51:00.001-06:00

In the end, it's all about each person putting together the building blocks of what they find works best for them. Like legos, it can be fun, it can be creative, and it can hurt like hell when stepping on them.

Comments here and in a forum about the 'Truth About...' post have given me a lot of food for thought. From the back of my brain, up popped my Evil But Occasionally Right Twin, to have a little talk with me about the long list of Where I've Gone Wrong, Where I've Gone Right, and Why I Owe It To Readers to post that. It seemed to feel that other post translated like, "You're dooooomed! Doomed, I tell you!"

I explained to the Little Voice that the post was just fine on its own, and that I have the noted info in other posts here and there. But IT thinks that while I'm depressing the crap out of everybody, I should at least provide a succinct list of what really does work for me, what doesn't, and maybe most importantly, what I haven't tried, and considerations I haven't addressed. That way, people can say, "Ha! You see! She has not investigated (thyroid disease, pancreatic tumors, or eating only fish eggs while living at 30,000 feet elevation and fasting only days of month that start with the numbers 1 and 2), so how can she possibly say that for the super-obese there is a limit to fat loss or that regain is close to inevitable? She hasn't tried everything!"

In what time I've had, I have been completely redesigning the blog. I added pages, if you see the tabs up top, "collections" of posts, like recipes, fat politics, or psychology, for example. But this was nagging me, so, let's see what we've got.

Stuff that is critical to my feeling well.

This may or may not relate to fat loss (does when I am losing, doesn't when I am regaining). But it certainly relates to my being functional, as much as possible.

1. Protein protein protein.

Animal Protein = amino acids = the building blocks of life. The difference between my body after 10 days of 100++g/day animal protein, vs. say, 60g, is unbelievable. It's running up my porch steps instead of two feet at a time like a little kid, holding on to a handrail. It's walking to the store and making dinner, instead of starving because it's too much effort to get up and go to the kitchen.

Issues:

It takes energy to intake the protein, but without protein I haven't energy to go get it.
This is hugely affected by my lack of appetite.
There is a limit to the protein you can eat as food, even trying.

Caveats:

Allegedly we should intake gelatin to get the 'other' amino acids; the ratio is imbalanced if you eat mostly muscle meats. You can buy a type that doesn't "gel" and can go in cold or hot liquids. It still has some taste unless it's very small amounts in a strong tasting food. Probably a great thing to put in say, sauteed mushrooms/veggies/sauce that you want to make a gravy, or in thick blendered drinks. Alternatively and preferably, make tons of "bone broth" as this has gelatin and those amino acids in it.
If you have issues with arachidonic acids (I cannot see that word without thinking of spiders. How did these words get so similar??) then red meat is probably not for you.
Animal protein also includes fish and eggs and cheese in my book. I don't even count plants.

Misc. Details:

Drinking whole or 2% milk for all the protein did not work for me. I had more energy than 'none' but felt quite weak, not only that I had no 'motive energy' but even had to ask my kid to open jars for me. I also got deep/cystic acne near lymphs with that (from two separate periods of trying it, so I do think that's what it related to), so unless you have access to raw milk, the processing may have some less than ideal effects, done in mass dosage. (That was another experiment that was not low-carb.)
Sometimes eating meat for all the protein doesn't work ideally either, because it's a ton of meat, which is a ton of money, which is a ton of planning shopping prepping cooking cleaning, which is a ton of stuffing it down your throat when you aren't hungry.
I've found that a lot of meat, with a couple snacks of protein drinks, plus some supplements of full spectrum amino acids, plus something with bone broth or gelatin, seems to work best for intaking a lot of animal protein with less money, less bother, and more variety.
Note that Low-Carb diets range dramatically in recommended protein intake. Literally from like 60g to 140g for the same sized person -- and those sizes are generally limited to 250# top weight defined.

2. Supplements.

In the next couple days I'll post the list of supplements I've gathered recommendations for from the people online I've come to respect. But to make a short list here, even when I am not doing a 'full' supplement panel, I tend to do much better if, every day for several days running, I have taken: A multi-vitamin; a multi-mineral; a B-Complex addition; and D3 (sometimes, also E and K2).

Stuff that screws me up

1. Anything that looks like a grain.

Gluten is the devil, period. I know some people can eat it (although research suggests it isn't good for anybody, it's just that many people the reactions are not external/conscious). Not only does it give me allergies, asthma, acid reflux, brain fog, but it gives me lethargy (reduces energy). That's bad. Aside from that, if I ingest it near ingesting soft-dairy, it will make me crave milk (even if the dairy was sour cream). Aside from that, if I eat it combined with fructose -- a perfect example might be a piece of whole wheat toast, with fruit-only diabetic jam -- I am ravenous for grains/carbs/sugars the entire day.

If I were an evil genius plotting the downfall of my nefarious enemy--who, in the comic book in my head, must also be fat, since otherwise he would look cooler than me--I would ensure he had a small dose of grains and fructose, preferably together. This would ensure my cruel victory and I could laugh MWAHAHA where is your willpower?!?!

OK maybe not. But I'm sure this would work. All I lack is a Nefarious Enemy.

Also: it's not just effects at the time. I have found I am affected a day or two AFTER eating them. A journal buddy of mine who has read a lot on brain chemistry and its response to food says that what you ingest actually may not kick in for hours or days. It makes it harder for people to see the correlations.

Also: corn too. I can eat corn tortillas without it seeming to bring on cravings or noshing desire hours or days later, unlike gluten grains. However, it's difficult to eat just one of them and they have about 10 carbs each, and even when I am not eating LC, I notice that anytime corn tortillas are involved, it seems like I eat a lot more than usual -- I even notice later that I am over-full. I think there is something in that grain that sparks me, even though I don't react to it quite like gluten.

2. A lot of LC sweets.

Although I have spent a decent chunk of the last 5 years on VLC to ZC -- as much by accident as design -- still, I am not really as averse to sweets as most people that eat that way tend to be. I think artificial sweeteners such as sucralose are probably more toxic than sugar alcohols and stevia (just wait and we will find out the 12 ways it kills us. Note that stevia is not approved probably because it's harder to corner the zillion dollar market on since anyone can grow a stevia plant and many companies can get the licorice taste out of it.), and I think eating dense sweet fruit as a sweetener (eg often dates/pineapples are used for that) is not the most healthy thing either, but it's not like this should be done often enough to kill you anyway.

On the other hand, due to sucralose it is possible to make a whole lot of food that is sweet and to spend a good chunk of LC time eating things with sweetener. If that works for you, great, but for me, eating regular sweet stuff (or other crappy stuff that is technically LC) prevents my palate from adapting and being happy with what you've got. ("Designing Your Appetite" was my rant about LC faking-it.) When I'm eating very little sweeteners, I can taste the sugar in onions and peppers and tomatoes. When I'm eating a lot more sweeteners, I am less sensitive to more subtle sweet, and I tend to need "more" sweet when I add it to something. It also tends to fuel a slight sugar-noshing tendency, and then I find that I want diet drinks, I want more coffee with sweetener, I want more LC treats, or whatever. I'm not against LC sweets, they're great. I have just found that if I start to overdose on them it can send me spiraling offplan eventually.

Stuff I haven't tried.

I am sure this list is endless. I am sure that I could continue my "but wait, I'll try this instead!" efforts for the rest of my natural life and never run out of options.

OK back to the point. Stuff I haven't tried. Let's see.

1. I have not had access to grass-fed meats/dairy in order to "do" primal or paleo well at all.

2. "" "" "" in order to do Peat-inspired eating properly.

3. "" "" "" in order to do Archevore/PaNu properly.

This might give you the idea that maybe the Omega 3:6 issue is a much bigger issue than realized and that had I done this, maybe results would be different. Who knows, maybe it is a much bigger issue.

4. I have not tried, let me see:
South Beach
Body by Science
Raw Meat diet
Raw Vegan diet
RBTI which I know zip about but journal buddies have mentioned
I invented the Cinnamon Toothpick Diet, inspired by the original KimKins diets, but I haven't tried it :-)

The Leptin Reset diet (which requires doing primal/paleo as its base)

So, if you're figuring that a different approach to eating might have a different result, then a huge focus on (a) Omega 3 balance and (b) seafood -- which I don't eat -- would definitely be doing something different than I have done.

I have also not had extensive testing to see if I have any of 97 possible disease syndromes, from cancer to autoimmune thyroid disease. Given my size, actually, I have 'issues' with every organ including the brain, that is a given. Hopefully not actual full blown disease. Nothing's impossible. I loathe the entire topic of medical stuff, I can barely get myself to go to the doctor for serious injuries, and my observation of the nightmare of years of friends struggling to get docs to listen/agree, testing and not getting all the tests desired, bad reading of results, docs insisting on crap like statins or artificial thyroid that just screws people up worse, hasn't improved my reaction to all things medical.

Apparently it is not an uncommon for the slightly Type-A personality defect I seem to have, to consider illness a bit of a form of weakness and to be extremely uncomfortable around it. (I hate hospitals!) That's me. So, if you go and look for every possible disease and condition and reading outside textbook ranges that you may have, that would be doing something I haven't done. Of course you'd probably end up prescribed all kinds of drugs which would kill you in some other way.

OK my duty is done. The Evil Twin is silent! I have built a little doorway to "what I haven't tried" so if someone wants to SEE that, now they can. Moving on!

Sacrificing Competence in the Name of Perfection

2011-11-16T03:00:00.001-06:00

My second-biggest problem (after not-eating for a long time, then later over-compensating), is not buying/making "less than perfect" or slightly higher-carb food... only to result in my not having food at all when I don't have energy, time, money, defrosting time, or hating what I have because I'm sick of it (or more often, my teen is).

So for the sake of not buying pinto beans or peas for stew, or deli meat, or almond meal, because those are not ideal foods, instead I either starved (usually), or (if I let the teen talk me into it) ordered pizza.

Oh yeah... that helped.

I suppose it's better to be less than ideal sometimes, than off-plan when you haven't time, money, energy, or other elements in place for the ideal.

For a long time I have not had certain foods in my house like beans and peas and carrots for adding to stew (I swore off legumes for no good reason except they were 'a little' carby and the eating plan folks I like seemed to add them to grains as the devil), deli meats, almond meal, soft cheeses for making salad dressings, because they weren't sufficient protein/fat and hence were less than perfect, higher carb, etc.

As a result, my food options ALL require cooking and have such a tiny range of variety that my teenager keeled over off the edge of boredom long ago.

I have a lot of smart journal friends who try to course-correct me on this regularly. Being rather type-A, and a bit of the "anything worth doing is worth overdoing" sort, I am prone to sacrificing being relatively competent at my eating plan in the name of being as close to perfect as possible.

Additionally, I'm neurotic about not affording grass-fed meat/eggs/dairy. I think that worsens how I over-compensate everywhere else.

I can't eat enough meat/eggs/cheese to make 1500 calories and 18 carbs most the time even when I try. My food options are going to have to expand a LOT if I want to raise both to whatever 'max' level turns out to work for me. Actually right now my mind is still boggling over that concept. Short of living on bacon and avocado (which really, is not such a horrible fate...) I don't know how that's going to work out. We'll see.

I've been thinking about a new approach (and more common posting) for this blog.

I think it would be nice to see more focus on Low-Carb just because it's awesome and healthy, and not just because people are despairing over being fat and hoping it will bail their ass out of it. That's great, but that's not the only reason it's cool.

Sure, it might be great for fat loss, but it's also great for lean gain, and it's also great for health reasons that aren't accompanied by obesity, and it's also great for just being very tasty, non-commercially processed food that doesn't hurt you. It's the divine food!

I also think it'd be nice to see more focus on the range of Low-Carb (let's say <80 carbs -- which is still lower than top Atkins or a lot of diabetic plans, which is what, 120?).

One reason I rejected everything down to VLC or ZC, in addition to the fact that a) I like meat and b) I was desperate because weight loss and stopped and I felt crappy and I thought doing LC "harder" was the answer... is because I felt guilty about the occasional thing like almond muffins, or coconut meal. They were too low on good fats or protein to count as food at all I felt.

I had the same theory about big-ass salads I might add -- my prejudice was less that sweetener was involved in some dishes, as the lack of O3/protein.

Yet dropping to VLC and even ZC repeatedly didn't help me in retrospect, did it? And aside from the macronutrient element, for me at least, eating that way has a variety of side-effects that are problematic, from major food boredom, to the fact that I end up with every food requiring shopping/defrosting/cooking/cleaning.

If you look at most LC recipes online, with rare exceptions they are so LC per serving that I could eat 5 meals a day and still be in the VLC (<35) camp. When I browsed my LC forum with this in the back of my head, I realized that aside from some targeted boards, nearly everything "by default" in most of the online LC world is not just LC, it's VLC. I hadn't really noticed that before.

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So following on my previous most-depressing-post-of-all-time, and after re-reading an old '97 post I had written about my one foray into the so-called Fat Acceptance world, and after considering my planned shift in intake, I've decided to slightly change the focus here.

I am going to remove the few refs to weight-loss (aside from a few great blog links and the occasional mention). This is not a diet blog, though it became one, I'm pulling that out. Lowcarb is valuable on its own terms regardless of weight issues.

I'm going to add a few refs to FA stuff. I don't care what I eat, I'm never going to be thin so I might as well accept it and move on, without the angst. I'll do the best I can, with creative adaptations here and there, and the result will be whatever it is. If the result is healthier (with a little more energy), I'll be happy for that, regardless of size. If it's a smaller size, great, but that can't be my focus anymore. The fail of that 'lust for result' is pretty obvious after five years. If what you're doing isn't working, do something else.

I'm also going to increase the focus on the larger spectrum of LC not just VLC. I would like to work on finding some more middle ground than "just meat" or "high-carb" especially for the sake of my teen.

And I'm going to start focusing more on lifestyle issues.

Ideas welcome.

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I'm changing the blog design as well. Looks funky right now, but I'm still working out ideas.

The Truth About Super Obesity and Weight Loss

2011-11-14T00:37:00.003-06:00

A little background on me and general stuff, before we begin.

I lost 170# on low-carb, which migrated to grain-free whole-foods a-little-dairy fairly primal, minus the 'grass-fed' element which is not do-able for me for several combined reasons. I have re-lost the last 50-100# of that repeatedly. I am, by category, 'super-obese'. When it comes to being fat, there is overweight, obese, severely obese, morbidly obese, and super obese. These are based on body fat percentage.

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I have come to understand that my expectations and my plans and my approach to eating, were not realistic.

I have come to understand that my experience, with the normal human variations, is echoed throughout basically all super-obese and many (not all!) of the higher-edge morbidly-obese people I have met in in person or online. I have also come to understand that what the science experts say, and the stats about fat loss and fat regain, echo my experience.

In short, if you remove the starry-eyed hope from the equation, you realize that pretty much all the facts from all directions say the same thing.

That's what this post is about. At the end, I have suggestions.

Take the best eating plans out there, for health, for sanity, for satiation, for nutrition: which for me amounts to basically "from moderate to zero carb depending on the person, grain-free, legume-free, minimal-fruits, whole-foods" eating plans.

Expect to lose fat. Whether you keep that weight off is another story entirely, but you can lose it.

If you are super-obese, expect to lose 'some' weight. Probably a lot less than you'd expect.

They're good plans. It's just a matter of inappropriate expectations.

I've come to consider these truisms.

1. Eating few carbs, with not-excessive calories, in whole unprocessed foods, does not solve super-obesity. It very rarely solves morbid obesity either, but that does happen sometimes.

There is no known solution for super-obesity. In fact, even severe gastric bypass will still only take off about the same weight you could lose just by eating awesome LC food, without screwing yourself up for life with nutrient absorption and other problems, so you might as well just eat decently instead.

2. The odds of losing all your extra fat are inversely proportional to the degree of your highest-weight bodyfat percentage. The odds of your keeping it off are very poor no matter what your starting weight, but are more remote in direct proportion to your highest bodyfat percentage.

The fat your body is likely to allow you to lose will still leave you severely if not morbidly obese. Women: up to 200 pounds, +/- around 20. Men: Up to 300 pounds, +/- around 20. It might be less. This is what can probably be 'affected'.

You will find that eating well (if you stay away from grains/fructose) is easy and in fact hunger is not only not an issue, but eating enough is. These kind of eating plans aren't hard. The food is awesome.

You will have energy while losing weight, which will change your life.

You will return to having none when you are not losing weight, which will screw it up again.

You can eat carbs for some energy then, when you must because lack of fat loss means you have no energy and makes you feel crappy if your carbs are too low. The body regains weight at truly breathtaking speed.

It's a cycle. It's predictable. You can see it coming. Feel it changing. You can plan for it.

You just can't do anything about it.

It's a Flowers for Algernon tragedy, except with bodyfat.

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I know most people don't want to believe it because they hope it's not true for them. I know the rest either figure their eating plan surely works perfectly for everybody, and/or works indefinitely when it does, or that -- especially given I'm a fatso after all -- I'm probably just lying.

(I saw a study recently that said not only did the half of the subjects that were obese lie about their intake (yes. All of them. yes. Just their half. Really.) but they all lied even to the same caloric number as well, I think it was. Given variations in gut bacteria and the inaccuracy of estimates and variability of people, I don't even know how this could be done group-wide on purpose. I mean -- Seriously? When is this going to start to seem unlikely to someone? I do believe in doubly-labeled water in trials (which this was). I do believe people do lie or mis-remember their food. But I also believe there has got to be something else going on with how we evaluate this.)

Now, for weight regain, I assume we are talking about a subconsciously driven increase in food intake behind this. It doesn't matter, since asking someone to willpower through a few million years of evolution is just retarded. So it amounts to the same thing: if the body wants to put the fat back on it's going to, period. We can set the stage and the play by our food, and supplements, and exercise (if you have the energy), and state of mind, but that is all we can do.

The decision about weight, not entirely in the next few hours but definitely in the medium never mind long term, is still the body's, in the end, not yours. You can only kid yourself that it's yours when your body isn't one-upping you in a debate about it.

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You don't have to believe me: look at the facts, at the stats, at the research. Objective reality supports this as true, even aside from my experience or yours. It's just that most of us in food-related social areas online are too busy 'hoping' to want to pay much attention to ugly facts.

All food-related social groups online, even the ones I like best, are Disney-esque. We all want, expect, demand, happy endings. We hide our eyes or leave the theatre of attention if we don't see one coming. Nobody talks about anything else but the positive.

If they do, either they are at best ignored or at worst cast from the tribe-of-blog, or it's implied that lack of success is rare and must be that someone didn't really stick with it, or do it right, or hard enough, or perfectly enough.

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There is a part of my mind that overrides objectivity. It rationalizes that even if I'm deluded, feeling better about things has its own positive element, and hope has a stand-alone value. So I tell myself:

Perhaps these eating plans work better for the super-obese if you have more 'perfect' food. The kind only wealthier people have. Everything grass-fed for example. Maybe then, some miracle would occur to make the equation work totally differently. Of course I realize that we could 'what if' every meal, forever, based on that movable goalpost of somehow-more-perfect.

But when I separate my hope and faith and wishing from the more objective part of myself, and I look at what I've seen with nearly everyone of great size online for 5 years, this appears to be the reality:

People can lose 200-300 pounds (+/- 20, the lower # for women, the higher # for men, with some variance for height/high-weight), before their body simply quits losing fat. It just stops.

I don't mean it's that long before they give up. If they seemed to give up, it's because what they were doing that was working, quit working, and eventually if you aren't insane, you quit repeatedly doing the same thing while expecting a different result.

As an online loose group community, we all assume that if someone quits losing fat it's because they gave up or messed up. We want to assume that, because it gives us hope. If it can just be the fault of the individual, it means it's possible. We can do it because we'll do better.

Does the body 'want' something to happen? I'm not comfortable talking about the body like it's a whole motive of intent on its own but then, I'm in a situation where it feels like that frankly. It does seem it has a certain homeostasis and possibly this is more severe the larger the person.

There are two variables: your food intake behavior, or how your body handles the food arranged by your behavior. Frankly it seems like if your body can't change one it can change the other.

*

Eating plan social groups on the internet (generally in the blogosphere, sometimes forums), operate like casual cliques, by sheer force of mutual longing as much as anything else.

If something doesn't work for a person, others will tell them how they obviously can't be doing it right, how it can't be so, or worst case how they are just either (a) a moron or (b) lying about it and/or a troll.

This is not just applied to the overall situation of losing weight on a plan, but also to the assumption that the plan works 'indefinitely' for everyone (since sometimes, the people commenting and getting slapped around a little, were actually the success stories earlier).

It's a body-based cargo cult around food. If you build it, they will come. If you eat this and supplement that and exercise like-so, you too can be beautiful and/or at least cool with the credentialed, like our mascot who owns the blog.

I am seldom anything but positive especially on other peoples' blogs. So this is not based on anything I have said but observation of what I see happening with (and to) others.

When people are very successful on an eating plan, they're held up as a testimonial for the cause. When people who are very successful abruptly cease to be, well, nobody knows what to think about that. Including the people it's happening to.

Especially them. Because nobody said that could, let alone would happen. That would have been a dose of realism in a Disney world, we can't have that. Everyone implies it can't be an actual body issue; it's clearly some moral / discipline / honesty fail on their part. It's their fault because they ate dairy or a low-carb product or they didn't do intermittant fasting or ...

Funny isn't it, that you can escape the blame-game of modern society with a group of better enlightened people in the lowcarb - paleo - zerocarb - primal eating groups, who far better understand (in general) the issues of adiposity and food chemicals and so on, but it's still there, it's just lurking at the far edge of fat, waiting to be applied to the person who becomes an outsider once keeping the faith in that plan as a solution is gone for them. Psychology doesn't change, the application point of it just moves over a little.

Everyone is sure that they ate meat and lost weight and so if you do too, you will too, and if you say it stops working for you, you're not losing weight, you feel horrible eating that way now, well you're just not trying, or you're (I am not making this up) probably eating too many almonds or something.

There are a tiny % of morbidly obese people who lost the weight and have kept all of it off. Even in their own class, the statistic is incredibly rare and precious. Very inspiring. There are a few more who have kept 'some' of it off. But even these people are not necessarily in the same body-response group as the super obese. In practice at least, it does rather seem like there is a sort of strata, or bandwidth of category, in how bodies respond. My totally unscientific observation over time is that it it seems tied at least somewhat to bodyfat % from the person's highest-weight. No matter at what weight they began eating lowcarb/primal.

Spend years on the internet in areas where super obese people come and go and talk about their results and you realize it is such a pattern that it is THE pattern. There isn't another pattern. That's it. This is reality.

All the just-not-mentioning-it from experts is either because they are still back in the dark ages thinking you just aren't trying hard enough, or because it isn't the upbeat keep-the-faith profile they must maintain in public, or maybe they just plain don't want to depress everybody, or dissuade the people who need to eat well most, from bothering to try at all.

Or maybe they just don't really know.

*

Generally, the public assumes the super obese are no different than anybody else when it comes to metabolism, just fatter. But this context also says that anything can happen, as the faith of the day. There will be rainbows, and someday, with enough primal paleo lowcarb food, you too can be a size... er, ok, well maybe a size 14, not a size 8, but it'll work out ok even if not as ideally as you hope.

Even on the rare occasion it's acknowledged weight loss may be a bit incomplete or imperfect for really big people, it's always made to sound like you know, you might have to accept a few sizes of difference. It's presented more like those last 20 or even 30 pounds might not get powered through. Nothing is ever specific or stark enough to indicate otherwise, let alone that it may well be drastically otherwise.

It's not anybody's fault the human body is what it is or behaves like that. The body is awesome, I'm sure it has got excellent reasons for this, we just don't happen to understand them yet.

*

I think if I hadn't built an edifice of hope on believing I could lose even the majority of fat, it would have been less traumatic.

The biggest thing is that "demoralized despair" would not have ruined me many times if I had understood that this just IS the way it IS. I could have focused differently, if I had known.

*

Stages of Weight-Loss Reality for the Super-Obese

I actually thought it was possible. I lost so much weight so fast. I was so happy. I thought I had proof. I thought I knew what worked. For the first time in a couple decades I had hope. I was even proud.

For the first time in that long I had ENERGY. To make dinner, never mind get involved with life, clean the cupboards and lift weights and move brick in the yard. That alone was worth its own glory. Hell, I would trade body size wishes for some energy, that is the primary issue.

I actually started making plans for having a life. I started thinking about things I had protected myself from thinking about before, because they'd seemed impossible. I felt so good, I was sure there were no limits.

It was honest to god the most exciting thing imaginable.

That's stage 1.

Stage 2: The "WTF?!" moment. What the... wait, what happened?

Stage 3: That horrible growing fear that maybe you were wrong. You KNEW it was too good to be true. Should you have known better? But no, but it couldn't be, but this works, it really does, it's just keeping-on, right, it will work again, if I just keep doing it, keep doing what totally isn't working now, but doing it harder, yes that's it. I will eat LOWER carb... I will eat ZERO carb... anything worth doing, is worth overdoing, I will cut out all foods but beef-chicken-eggs and supplements and drink a gallon of water a day, I'll find every way I can to do it more and do it harder!

Stage 4: The adaptive response. OK, that's just not working and I can't do it any harder. I'm not losing fat and I feel like crap, I could deal with one or the other but not both. So what else is an option? Small meals big meals intermittant fasting days high fat low fat coconut oil is the answer days zero carb cycling carb higher carb lower carb no gluten no dairy no legumes no nuts extra water let's just fast a day or two a week yes that's the ticket, there's got to be an answer, it's just a matter of looking, please god let there be an answer, surely it's here, I've had 35 variants looking for a solution but I know there are more --

-- and suddenly you've become a primal paleo lowcarb yo-yo dieter even if you never even dieted before.

Stage 5: Then you almost wish you hadn't hoped in the first place. Hope HURTS when it's crushed.

Rinse. Repeat.

*

All this is because in our mindset based on faith, we assume there IS an answer. That even though there are few to no 5 year success stories in this class III category, that this doesn't reflect reality, there's probably just not many sure but I'll be an exception.

That even though world experts like Dr. Jeffrey Friedman actually have spelled out publicly precisely this experience, that it'll be different for me.

He could not have made it any clearer: the body of people who were huge, lost tons of weight, at which point they were still obese or morbidly obese, but then just stopped losing fat. No matter what, even when in a metabolic ward eating 700 calories a day as one example.

The body has a limit to the fat loss it will allow and that is that. It's a very high limit so it doesn't affect most people. People who are much past the morbid-obesity point, run into it. Here's humor of a sort: If they're just somewhat past that point, they might merely think it's a problem with the last 15-30 pounds, and everyone says to them, "well gosh that is what your body is happy with," or whatever.

If they are still 100-200# over any sane weight, that excuse is obviously not going to work, since nobody is suggesting 200# overweight is healthy and your body's good with that. Yet it's actually the same situation.

But socially, whether people will tell you that it's your body's choice, versus your screwing things up in some way, depends on whether you tell them how much weight is 'left' to lose to be lean. Even though the equation and experience doesn't change based on that.

At that point, you see that there's something else going on. According to Dr. Friedman, nobody actually knows what's going on or why. Nobody knows why people really huge can lose a whole lot of weight but then, even still morbidly obese in some cases for example, fat loss just stops.

And obviously, when you no longer have fat cells dumping their energy into your blood constantly, your energy level changes too.

*

I'm less disappointed in the fat loss part, than in the part where I haven't motive energy.

The bipedal walrus body is just horribly inconvenient and a social nightmare. That part I can deal with better; the energy void, though, is devastating, life-wide. You have no functional life if you have no energy.

My biggest issue currently, is a cycle:

1 - what appears to be an adipose-cell fog of leptin (a superstitious guess, this just makes sense to me) that makes me have no appetite 95% of the time (a situation I've had for years and years)

2 - no motive energy at all makes it very difficult to force myself to even walk to the kitchen never mind cook, especially as I am not hungry

3 - which eventually results in body nutrient-famine response punching through that fog and driving me to eat, specifically targeted at the most immediate and intense energy sources.

It would be extreme binge-behavior, and can be if I don't plan in advance for its inevitability and have things on hand. If I get immediately to saturated fats and a little protein and stuff it down me before my body (which is basically freaking out) starts eating everything carby/sweet in sight at high speed, I'm ok. I'm pretty good at heading it off at the pass, cheese is my friend for that.

While it calms down, I have time to cook something substantial. I can eat for a few days then, have just slightly more energy during that time to get up and cook, or more like a slight glow-reminder of it, anyway, and slightly more desire to eat.

Then the bare hint of energy fades and the appetite drops and the whole cycle begins again.

This is because I am not on an eating plan. If I were, I'd be forcing myself to eat according to plan.

*

I have come to believe that the super obese are all in pretty much the same situation as a generality, at least.

I feel like nobody is being forthright about this, I mean the experts we all read. There are a few likely good reasons. But either way, nobody is giving people of this size reasonable expectations.

With the super obese, we're talking about a predictable profile. Not just one person here or there that we can assume is screwing it up. It isn't, for example, just me; I can't be responsible for why gastric bypass patients in the science lab have, interestingly, about the same experience I've had, even though I've lost my weight through "eating well" instead of through surgery and starvation. I can't be responsible for what I see in others online with the same experience who even have different eating plans, or went a shorter or longer time, more or less weight, before basically the same thing happened.

And while I'm at it, I'd just like to add that this profile is not limited to the super-obese, it merely appears to be the 'given' for them. It is the norm not the exception in the morbidly obese strata as well, but there ARE exceptions in that bandwidth, there are people who lose 'all' their excess weight and actually maintain that -- they are rare but it does happen. (There is a larger % in that strata that do lose and keep off 'some' fat - a lot of it. So that one at least has more hope.) And this profile is 'not uncommon' although it's not the norm in the severely (but not morbidly) obese strata -- I use these groupings only for convenience.

So, to me this does indicate that the human body has some variation in when/why/how it applies this "cessation of fat loss without regard to food intake/exercise/etc." experience. The experience is not limited to the super-obese, it's just almost-if-not-entirely inevitable with them.

*

There are things that seem to come with this body size, experiences, that may not be the same as people with less fat lost. People have symptoms, body changes, and don't know what to do about it or what it means. Sadly, if you report such things, you're told you're wrong, that it isn't happening as you report. So... what? You're an idiot? You're lying?

One small example of several: after losing a LOT of weight, one can develop reactive hypoglycemia, even to nearly zero carb meals. Allegedly, this just doesn't happen on low-carb. I've seen it stated flatly more than once, and in direct response to someone who just freaking said plainly it did, no invalidation there...

I'm not diabetic, but I bought a blood glucose monitor specifically to figure out this issue. Was I hallucinating, when I'd nearly pass out from the blood sugar drop, after the bacon or sausage and eggs breakfast? The same one I'd eaten through losing about 130# at that point, now suddenly affecting me like a megadose of pasta would have at my highest weight and worst insulin resistance state?

So I checked. Hey! My monitor was hallucinating right alongside me! I consider its readings a more objective answer to the question. Obviously, for me, it does happen, even on lowcarb, hell even on what most people call zero carb.

This does not make me confused about what I really ate, or unable to count to 5 carbs, an idiot or a liar or whatever. It just means that this legitimately does happen.

It also happens for other people, who are the ones I've seen talking about it online (I haven't brought it up in blog comments, but others have). That becomes the one-white-crow theory of course; if it happens for anybody, then obviously it IS possible.

To me, the 'anomalies' in any science are the most interesting questions. It opens the door to understanding something that obviously, we don't yet. Why does this happen? Why does it seem to happen to people who have lost > 100# for example? Why does it seem to more often be reported when a food like eggs are involved?

(Note: Dr. Ray Peat actually has the solution to this, but you won't like it. Orange juice is tasty suicide, in the food world I've been indoctrinated with (although RP says fructose is deadly in combination with PUFA, but not for example without it). What I found impressive was that he knew about it, and had already written about it, while other experts were just telling people their reported experience of it didn't happen.)

*

It is socially awkward when experts talk the facts. Like there being in many folks an obvious but weird cap on fat loss, as Dr. Friedman talked about. Or there being, in pretty much everyone, no known solution to avoid weight regain, as Dr. Sharma talked about.

I have only my experience. It just so happens I see it echoed all over, pretty much universally in people who began super-obese, and then in smaller but still significant percentage in the morbidly obese group.

Some dysfunctional element on the part of people who don't want it to be true--that includes everyone, that includes me--makes it the thing nobody talks about.

Good eating does not solve super obesity as a problem because nothing does. That's the way it is.

*

I am forcing myself to say it publicly so it will get said.

I expect that this will make people mad, and they'll say, you shouldn't demoralize others.

Or, "just because it's that way for you doesn't mean it is for all." We all want to hope so.

I would rather people tell me the truth than just make me feel better, especially when we're talking about some very physically, emotionally, and even financially powerful stuff involved with years of effort at weight loss. So, I want others in my situation to have an honest reality check.

*

So what's it mean? Should morbid to super obese people not even try? It doesn't mean that at all.

It means that the end-result experience will be different from people trying to lose 30#, generally, and that, if we know this in advance, our approach to the experience can also be different, which hopefully will improve and extend both the initial experience and the end result for people of great size.

1. Definitely people should make an effort to eat well. Even if you didn't lose a single pound, and you will for sure, you would still be way healthier, minus a variety of medical symptoms, improve your body in other ways, it is still well worth the effort. Eat better or die, it's a pretty simple choice. Life extension is really the primary thing here. Every harmful thing you put in your body, every medicine you have to take for some symptom, is shortening your life.

It took me less than 3 weeks on meat/eggs/cheese lowcarb to discover that my severe asthma, severe allergies, severe acid reflux, acne, brain-fog, bloating, and more were gone. It was amazing. As much of that was due to wiping out gluten as carbs, I might add. But even if nothing else had ever happened, this alone would have been totally invaluable.

2. Supplement the hell out of yourself from day 1. I don't care if you don't think you need it or people assure you that just eating meat and a multi-V is plenty. You've probably years of profoundly, crisis-level nutrient-depletion if you are morbidly or super obese. Even if that weren't so, research shows your bigger body needs more nutrients. Anyway, so what? As long as you are not overdosing on the very few things that have a known upper limit, then why would it hurt? And if it IS needed, it could make a huge difference.

In my next post I'm going to give a summary of the general supplement recommendations I have collected over time for alleged best health and weight loss, from sources I respect. It'll be up to the reader to go look at the blog links I will provide, see what and how much they (or your own people) recommend, I'm not providing specifics on purpose. But I will outline the map of what's included, so you know what to search on. Bear in mind that everything in the body works together. Supplementing any one thing without the others may result in even more imbalance. (Probably much less an issue for things most people dearly need, like magnesium, Omega 3's, K2 and D3, than things some people are already too high in, like iron.)

3. It's so easy to drop low in calories, not be hungry, live on meat, lose weight and feel awesome about all of that. This may actually be an even bigger issue with bigger people because you're more likely to lose larger amounts of weight faster, than leaner people -- for awhile, of course. Not indefinitely.

Force yourself to eat more good fats and more calories, to have the maximum amount of nutrition possible in each day without gaining weight and hopefully while losing as slowly as possible. This is only my superstition, but I feel the body might react with less 'resistance/panic' to high pound weight loss if it's more gradual and there's plenty of calories and lots of nutrients coming in, than it does when it's a massive fast lost, the person is chronically undereating, and the nutrient profile is very skewed by limited food range. Doing this won't necessarily prevent a cessation of fat loss, or the regain-response; these seem to be fairly unavoidable. But it might allow the total weight coming off to go on longer/be greater, which to me seems good.

4. Shift your thinking about it, this is the most important thing. For the super-obese, the goal is completely different. The goal isn't to lose as much weight as possible, as fast as possible. That idea is based on the thought that once this happens, then wherever you are, is where you stay, and you live happily ever after. That's not the reality here.

The destination of even "most" of one's fat lost, is unlikely (if not impossible) to reach for the super obese. And whatever (usually still extremely fat) point one reaches when the fat loss stops, that usually just means the end of the road, and at that point your body will be pushing regain through one or more avenues.

This doesn't mean it's hopeless, it just means that your focus needs to be different. In this case, weight loss is truly an example of where the "journey" is the thing to enjoy.

Fat loss = energy to really fat people. One of the primary problems super obese people have is no freaking energy. This is fairly obvious, as the energy is being stored. The best part about losing weight when you are super obese isn't that you are losing weight. It's that while you're losing weight, you have some degree of energy, because your body is dumping fat cells (energy) into the bloodstream.

So the goal is not thin-ness, it is functional motive energy. With that energy, you can 'have a life' to whatever degree possible, and that might include getting in much better physical shape for example. Without that energy you are treading water, at best.

*

Let us say that your body is going to allow you to lose, 190 pounds, to just pick a number. Now, you can lose it as fast as possible, and have lots of energy during that time; or you can eat as many carbs/calories as lets you lose weight, but no less because that increases the degree of ketosis and weight loss, and you want to take what amounts to the maximum possible time to lose what your body allows.

With the latter approach, you have some energy. You have it for as long a time as possible, while you go through the fat loss.

And as an added bonus, if #3 turns out to have any validity, this way you might even get to have even longer in the loss period, and lose even more of that fat, as a result. In fact, since your carbs and calories are also higher in this model, if #3 has any validity, this #4 would add to it even more.

With every pound you reduce from wherever you are (even if this is happening in the 15th cycle), you are a little more limber, a little more strong/light by comparison. It's all good.

The weight-loss period itself -- not the end goal but the period during which it occurs -- needs to be the actual focus. If it's slow, as long as you have a little bit of energy, it's good. The measure of 'adjustment' of your macronutrient intake should be based on what makes you feel fairly decent.

When I thought that I could lose most my extra fat, my big drive was to do so, intensely. Now that I understand that this is just plain not going to happen, and that there is pretty much some body-allowance for fat loss quantity, and then a return-reaction that most likely will increase the weight again (doesn't have to be the full amount of course--there IS a 'degree' of success possible here), now I understand that the period during which I am losing weight is the best part.

I would rather spend 2 years losing the same amount of weight, as 4 months, because that means I had two years of some energy to live my life with, before it changed. Even if not a ton of energy, even 'a little' is more than most super obese people have.

It is not healthy to lose/regain weight repeatedly. One can only hope that doing so as slowly as possible in both directions, will reduce the degree of harm.

*

I believe that if I had gone into this with realistic expectations, and if I had taken the approach I outlined above as a result, that my body might have allowed somewhat more fat loss overall, that I would have spent much longer in the happy phase of feeling decent, that I would not have stressed my body remotely as much with fast lost, and with under-calories, and with under-supplementation, that I would not have essentially become a low-carb/primal 'yo-yo dieter' in my desperate attempt to find something "else", some tweak of better-perfection, to restore the initial loss and energy level.

I would not have gone through a lot of trauma of having to radically readjust expectations. For those who think this is a little thing, I'm here to tell you that super-obesity is the health equivalent of being in a wheelchair -- worse, in some respects, since even people in a wheelchair can have the motive energy and enthusiasm to make dinner or attend the kid's soccor game, and the social reaction to someone normal looking in a wheelchair is probably better than the social reaction to someone who weighs 450#. You'll just have to trust me on this one.

Thinking this problem is fixable, then suffering the cycles of trauma because apparently you're just not good enough or your plan isn't perfect enough, only to finally realize--from looking at the stats, listening to the experts, and observing people in the same situation around you for years--that actually... it isn't fixable -- well that sucks.

There is a degree of "flexible" in the middle that you are welcome to go down through, and your body will arrange your coming back up through also, and then you can attempt to go down through again -- well, that's what there is to work with. If you know that, you can actually work best with it and get the maximum happiness and health from it with the minimum harm. If you don't know, you just harm your health worse and suffer instead, because you have a completely different goal, and you think the way it's working is that you aren't trying hard enough or not trying the right thing or it isn't perfect enough or whatever.

So this is not what anybody wants to hear. Even me. But this is the truth.

The Fat Acceptance people will probably say they knew this already and it supports their point.

I am not depressed. I am disappointed but I'm moving past that. You know, life is what it is. I could be dead of disease, and were it not for my body's ability to allow unbelievable amounts of fat storage, I'm sure I would be. I could have lost limbs or be paralyzed, or be in chronic pain, or be stuck in some starving or war-torn country, or have my body and mind forever screwed up by horrible combat experiences -- the whole world is filled with people in situations who deal with it every damn minute, hour, day.

I am huge and have no energy. I say I have no money but compared to most of the people in the world, my good job and teen I have a good relationship with and the kitties and the garden and the 3 bedroom tract home in nowhere Oklahoma, are a combined wealth beyond imaging. Frankly, comparatively, my situation is pretty damn good. It just isn't as good as some others. I'm not going to complain.

To a great degree I feel it is slightly late for me to be attempting to explore the different-approach to all this that I outlined above. I have already dug my hole in deeper with the way I have behaved with fat loss and my attempts at it over the last 5 years. But, I am ever the optimist. I'm going to take my own advice, and see if I can find a max-carbs max-calories max-supplement plan that allows a very slow fat loss with some residual energy side effect, so I can at least have more of a life than my weight-related energy-depletion otherwise allows.

PJ

The 10,000 Ways That Don't Work

2011-11-11T00:07:00.007-06:00

I've worked 20 hours a day, 7 days a week from last December 9 to May. I worked more like 16/6.5 since then. Starting just at the beginning of November, a bit over a week ago, I have actually been taking time off. I've had 1.5 weekends entirely off now, and 1.5 days (Wednesdays) entirely off now. I've gotten more sleep in the last 10 days than I have gotten in any 30-40 days in about a year.

This has led to the understanding that if you sleep 3 hours a night, you are not going to lose weight, for several good reasons.

I was re-reading my blog, like a 5-year review. I summarized many of the best/worst things I have done since I began this journey:

The things that failed abysmally (cheat days aka the worst version of carb cycling. Fruit+dairy. Lots of legumes. Anything with gluten).

The things that worked best when I was able to actually do them (hyper-nutrient supplementation. Bulk cooking of stews, quiche, and meat in general. Lifting weights, when I had the energy).

The things that were great ideas on paper but I was never actually able to sustain for more than 10 minutes (eating veggies, besides the occasional carrots/peas/potatoes in stews).

The problems that I had related to my eating (reactive hypoglycemia, particularly to things like eggs for breakfast. Addictive reactions to a lot of stuff. Total 'crisis' reaction to VLC).

The solutions that I eventually found for those (Ray Peat's adding-carbs if you eat eggs, like a little fresh squeezed orange juice, as if to 'soak up' the extra insulin that eggs in particular generate. Not eating the stuff I react to but more importantly not eating other things like gluten which makes me react to dairy, which I don't if I'm not eating gluten. Not doing VLC, or adding enough carbs to keep me out of major ketosis, or not doing it so suddenly anyway and not for long-term).

The good advice I couldn't take: like Regina Wilshire's excellent well-balanced nutrition plan which requires a well balanced person with a well balanced schedule, neither of which fit me. Like "everyone's" advice to eat grass-fed meats/dairy because store-bought is so high in Omega 6 which causes hormonal and other problems, but it's not for sale around me, I haven't had a car for a long time (not a big deal unless you need to leave the city), I don't much like the taste of the stuff as it turns out, and I can't afford it anyway.

The bad advice I took, or perhaps, the good advice I implemented so badly: weekends are for carbs, it's the 80/20 plan, it's carb cycling.

The advice I still haven't figured out the value (or not, or depends on the person) for: avoid deli meats (processed food yuck), avoid diet sodas (fake sweet causes body reaction, plus it's toxic chems), eat veggies/don't eat veggies, eat less carbs/eat more carbs, eat on interim fasting/eat lots of small meals per day.

The foods I seem to do best on: for LC, eggs, burger patties, chili verde, chicken, cheese. Everything else is too much trouble. Not-more-than moderate amounts of beans/peas if in a meat stew. Whole milk, fresh squeezed OJ and potatoes and corn tortillas when on the Peat-ish eating approach (which is not lowcarb).

The foods I seem to do worst on: milk as sole protein source (since I couldn't get decent meat, it was a suggestion by Peat--and it was ok, I just didn't feel "strong" at all. This could be partly related to additives in the milk, not the milk itself). Legumes as primary carb source. Gluten of any kind. Veggies which I will starve and let compost before eating. Lovely food that takes time to prepare which I will starve and let go bad before making time/energy to prepare it.

The foods that most often reflect my utter see-food diet downfall: gluten-free homemade cookie dough. Pasta with pesto. Order-in pizza with major gluten-ease pills all through eating it. Thing they have in common: they are really fast, easy, and high in both carbs/sugars and fats.

% of weight gained compared to % of time spent eating at least relatively lowcarb: direct 1:1 correlation, including "degree" based on just how far outside of lowcarb I was, with the exception of the Peat-inspired eating approach, which lost me a few pounds despite that my carbs were actually so high I must have been carrying my full 30-odd# of water weight. If I had only felt 'strong' on it -- and not 'ok but oddly lacking in any motive-power' -- that might have worked. Of course, a lot of things, but for one symptom or reaction or another, whether promptly or eventually, "would have worked."

Dr. Sharma has a blog post: Your Body Is Happy To Wait For Your Weight To Come Back

...which pretty much says what every serious review of weight loss says: the quantity of people who lose significant amounts of weight and keep that weight off--and I don't mean for a month, or even a year, but for many years--is such an incredibly small % of the people who attempt to lose weight (and even radically smaller if you count the people re-losing it repeatedly as separate trials), it's almost ridiculous to even bother.

On this count I am starting to get a lot more sympathy with the Fat Acceptance crowd, although aside from this post I wrote about Fat Acceptance - sort of - I haven't had any real exposure to it. As I mentioned in that post, everything has a limit. Even people who are ok with obesity or obese people have all kinds of limits in a variety of areas that kick in, making it clear that acceptance is usually conditional and hence not really acceptance at all.

Aside from Dr. Sharma's blog linked above, I have some others I have added recently:

Dr. Jack Kruse (intro|blog), a neurosurgeon who in one off the cuff sentence (saying that the super-obese and anorexics share the same leptin profile) won me over since this explains an element of my life that nobody believes (given my weight) but is actually my biggest problem (since sufficient eating/protein/nutrition is necessary and without it I end up 'reacting' and eating badly instead). He has a lot to say about leptin, and adrenals. He essentially suggests what amounts to PaNu or Paleo.

Dr. Ray Peat (website with articles), is a guy who's been involved with research longer than I've even been alive and I'm 46. He has a lot to say about hormones, and thyroid, and a lot of stuff I didn't know. He won me over when I tried an experiment based on his writing. He said that eggs have a big insulin response and eating several of them ought to be accompanied by some fresh-squeezed orange juice (my layman translation is 'to soak up the extra insulin an insulin-resistant body creates in reaction'). This seemed like Worst. Idea. Ever. to a lowcarber until I tried it and found my 'reactive hypoglycemia' was magically cured. This one thing made me realize he might know more than some folks who had never mentioned such a thing in my years of reading their stuff. As it turns out, his articles library (about 80 of them) has so much stuff I didn't know, it's ridiculous. A good educational source even if you don't follow his suggestions.

I had previously mentioned here (I think) Dr. Kurt Harris (get started), a Radiologist, who has an eating plan he initially called PaNu -- 'new paleo' -- and who has what I think is the preferable insight of eating today's foods based on the ideal way of keeping the body healthy as it might have been (we dream) in ancient days, as opposed to eating foods solely based on whether they existed or were known to be used in paleo times. So he ends up being mostly low carb mostly lacto-paleo. I like his stuff in part because he's just a kind of reasonable, in moderation, do what you can till you get there, kind of person in his writings, which is rare and rather nice.

So after reviewing 5 years of history, and considering everything I've tried (which amounts to close to everything), I have some thoughts.

1. Lifestyle is first. If you're working 20/7, probably your carb count is not really your biggest problem. Reducing carbs or anything else won't improve you in that situation, it will merely reduce the degree of your tragedy. Which still might result in actual tragedy. Get enough sleep and solve whatever is making you stressed out. Take up regular meditation /prayer of any kind that helps you relax. The results are body-wide and ongoing.

2. Medium-term planning is needed. When I plan a week in advance I do ok for a week. That's all. My energy is very inconsistent and usually nonexistent. I will starve before I get up and make food if I don't have energy. I will eat crap if the teen is leaning on me to get/make something, because it's easiest and she likes it. Longer-term prep, in my case, is required.

3. Planning to eat things you don't much like is a total FAIL. Experimenting is good, but if you try it and you still think it's vile, give up. Figure out what you like that won't kill you and eat it.

4. Habits take work to form. Longer term prep/plan that gives them a chance is needed. Setting up supplements a week ahead of time for example needs doing if there are chronic problems taking them otherwise. Getting up early enough to make coffee and even food if you have trouble eating in the morning and you want to do so, is simply necessary. #1 affects this, obviously.

5. Actually research what's in the food you eat. If it turns out one of your main problems is being very estrogen-dominant due to a life of crappy food, living on foods that are 'mostly decent' but actually add to the problem is not helpful at all.

6. Outside of points 3 and 5, don't obsess. It's better to eat some beans than end up eating pizza because you knew beans were inferior and kinda carby so you didn't use them to make stew or chili you could have had instead so you didn't have any easy/quick/unfrozen/tasty food or energy when the demand came in.

7. Don't let your teenager determine your diet. Make a decent diet, make enough for her too, and let her starve if she doesn't like it. Otherwise you both eat like crap, she gains yet more weight, and you're mutually miserable. Good judgement and childhood do not go together for the most part.

I think I should spend the rest of the year (what little time I'll have before then) coming up with some kind of short, medium and year-long plan for 2012, and working on the "lifestyle" issues that directly interfere with my "food" issues.

I believe it was Edison credited with saying:

Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is to try just one more time.

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Veggies, V-Slicers and Very Bad Ideas

2011-03-31T18:06:00.005-05:00

This is cool.

I bought a V-Slicer Mandoline I've wanted for a long time. It's the affordable sort but it's pretty darn good. It slices thin, thick, or tiny (matchstick) julienne, or larger (McD french-fry size) julienne. Or you can use it for slicing 'cubed' stuff. It's superfast to clean up (just rinse off), easy to use and has its own holder you can mount it on the wall with if you like. It has reduced the 'prepping veggies' part of these dishes to vastly, vastly less trouble and better outcome.

I've been reading about everything from OTC supplements to illegal steroids geared toward fat loss. This is probably indicative of my state of mind in some fashion. It's unfortunate that most stuff is so much better for men than women. Everything mucks with hormones which is a big deal, but what the hell, if my hormones were anything akin to balanced I would not weigh what I do anyway.

A recent agreement between the 14 year old and I, resulted in my agreement that we would go on a "mostly Salad and Stir-Fry" diet for awhile (she lasts on any plan about 3 days, sigh).

She just doesn't like meat and eggs enough to eat enough of them IMO or eat them 'mostly'. So I figure I will get her to take some protein powder and amino acid supplements, eat what meat I can stuff down her, she does eat cheese, and otherwise the 'salad and stir-fry' will have to do. She likes vinaigrette dressings blessedly, and Penzeys provided me some nice spice mixes to add to those, and anything to rein in the amount of junk food she eats is good. Maybe if I keep her stuffed with veggies she will not have much desire to eat everything-else.

Lowcarb lost me what, about 170# total. I have regained and relost the last 70# of that several times now. That is really exasperating to me. I can't believe how FAST my body gains weight. I don't even have to eat hideously. When I'm LC, I am really lowcarb and I am really low calorie too, just by default (I like meat and eggs and cheese more than I like everything-else that I could eat 'in moderation'). But if I'm not doing that, I'm gaining weight. It's so frustrating!

Maybe lowcarb 'normalizes the metabolism' for some people. It didn't for me. It just got the mega chronic insulin issues taken care of. And that did work for that part of it. But obviously there is a lot more than that involved.

My big wonder is why the hell it works differently at different times, I mean what is going on with my body that it is so unpredictable?

I have had cycles where I went on LC, lost 13# in water weight the first 24 hours, and 25# the first week (water of course), this is normal, this is the 'extra' I carry (not all of it, but most of it).

I have had cycles where I went on LC, and after 4 weeks had lost all of 8# and that includes the water weight. In other words I did not even lose the WATER -- let alone any fat. (So I did not lose 8# you understand. I lost 1/4 to 1/3 of the water weight I should have lost the first week -- that is all.)

Why? Why would it be so different?

It's surprising how much of "drive" takes the part of "hope". If I have hope that I can lose some fat and feel better, then I find myself planning it and counting the days and that sort of thing. If my results make me feel like I have no particular hope of losing even the water weight never mind anything more at any speed where I'd reach even 300# prior to age 412 if I dieted consistently, then I completely lose all volition for wanting to bother at all.

April Fool's Day is the big day. The kid and I begin her "salad and stir fry" eating plan tomorrow. I will probably live more on eggs and meat as usual since I like that better.

I am hoping to resume lifting weights though. I guess I'll see how my energy does for that.

PJ

Intermittant Fasting - 2 Week Update

2010-11-07T15:04:00.006-06:00

Alrighty then. In the end, I began intermittant fasting on Oct 24. I started 'tracking' Monday 10/25. It's been two weeks since then. The plan is a 4-hour window for food each evening. Generally, it's about 5pm-9pm. It's allowed to shift if my schedule does, but it's a 20 hour fast period.

So here's a summary of the reactions and results so far:

Hunger > I was hungry the first two days of it. This is ridiculous because normally I can fast for 1-2 days at a time without having hunger bother me. I am far closer to anorexic with occasional see-food frenzies, than anything troubled by meal-skipping. So I concluded that it was probably just some psychological side effect of telling myself I wasn't allowed to eat during the day. From day 3 on that wasn't an issue.

Food limits > I did not set a limit on options except: very-low-carb, whole-foods, no grains, few or no legumes (peas and green beans in our case), and trying to keep the dairy (cream and cheese, no limit on butter) reasonably low. I could eat as much as I wanted, I have tracked in general all my intake, but I haven't worried about quantity being too high (it hasn't been, but I was willing to allow it to be).

Eating to appetite > There is no issue of not being full on this. I was willing to eat as much as I wanted but, since I am mostly eating proteins/fats, that really can only be so much, anyway, until I am not only satiated but a bit stuffed, and never want to see a strip of bacon again. Well, for 24 hours, anyway.

Adherence > How well did I do? Well, let's see. On Oct 29 I let my kid talk me into eating some halloween candy that night. On Nov 6 I ate at a restaurant, still only one meal, and meat/veg (fajitas), but then utterly blew it by eating a Ghirardelli's vanilla-bar and milk later that night. Aside from that it has gone ok.

Problems > I'm undereating. I really TRY to eat enough to be a day's worth of calories. Even at the lowest imaginable end for someone who weighs 400#, no matter how much progress I've made from above that. But it's hard! Seriously there is just only so damn much food you can eat. Meat is FILLING. I think I need to consistently work on ingesting larger portions of my primary meat (chuck burger 80/20, commercial, or, organic chicken thighs, or commercial chicken breasts).

I find that if I up my fats the way I want to, it's even harder to eat more meat. For example, if I am having a plain chuck burger patty (with Montreal seasoning -- this is salt, black pepper, garlic, and red peppers, granulated together) and nothing else, I can eat a really BIG one. We're talking, 12-20oz (the top one, I have to make myself eat, and I'm stuffed, but it's possible; I'm happy with the 12). But if I put some butter on the top and melt as much butter into it, when it comes out of the pan, as I can before eating it (which is very yummy), I eat about 6-9oz max and I'm happy. More than that seems like stuffing it down just for the sake of it.

I like slab bacon, and try to eat some of that just because it's yummy. But there is not a lot of meat on bacon once it's cooked, so this is more a thing on the side than any serious meal contribution.

I had this realization at one point that somewhere in my past, media has indoctrinated me with this idea that any meal over ~280 calories was hugely fattening. Of course that's because they're trying to get you to live on grains way too many meals+snacks a day. And that conveniently dismisses "real food" -- like meat and even low-sugar dairy -- from being a worthy consideration if it's in any quantity at all, as the fat content would usually kick it up to that or higher.

So, I aim for getting "over 1200 calories a day". I'd like it to stay under 2300 but I won't stress if it goes higher. At this point, the highest I've ever gotten it was around 1500, twice. Usually it's around 1100-1200. Several times it's been around 800-900. This is the same problem I've always had on VLC (in the previous eras when I could do VLC), except a bit worse since I have one eating period and not 3 meals.

People who do IF tell me, "You still have multiple meals. They are just spread out over your 'eating window'."

Well 4 hours is not much of an eating window. If I eat a full protein/fat meal at the front of that, I am not remotely hungry 4 hours later. Plus cooking twice that close together is offputting. I have enough of a hard time doing it once.

I could make the eating window longer, but I just feel like that kind of defeats the point of the fasting, aside from which since my window is at night, partly because that's where my available time is, making it longer would just take it too close to sleep.

Advantages > It's sure a lot easier to only have to worry about food once a day. It's a lot easier to only have to cook once (although I might cook a few things at once). It's a lot nicer that since I can eat what I like as long as it's LC whole foods -based, I can have stuff my kid doesn't like AND stuff she does, and she is happy and I get something for a little variety. (This coming week is The Great Coconut Milk Curry experiment series, yay! She doesn't like Eastern spices so I never get them, but I think now I can have some.) There are less dishes generated (thanks a LOT for that, to me that's one of the worst parts about this eating plan, cleaning or paying someone to clean becomes a much larger issue for me).

New Stuff > Apparently cheese gives me inflammation. I was so loathe to believe this, since I consider cheese the divine food, that I did some experimenting. Twice, I'd not had enough to eat that day, was either out of food or out of time, so I just ate about 4-5 ounces of block cheese cut into sticks. Both times I woke up feeling like I'd been run over by a truck in the night, my lower back hurting, and so bloated, I literally had to rock back and forth to get enough momentum to turn over and sit up (and it was an unhappy process). Both times I told myself, well yeah, but I ate it with X! or I ate it with Z! So those are the culprits! (Later note: apparently it's only the Tillamook pepperjack cheese that does this. I get gluten-reaction from it! Not from cheaper pepperjack. Weird!)

Finally I realized I was in denial. So I ate early, just meat, and then ate cheese just like that (pepperjack in this case) at the end of my eating window not that long before sleep. And yep. I woke up just like that. When I just eat meat, I wake up fully awake, clear headed, and I am 'limber' and I just get out of bed. When I eat dairy or cheese, I wake up feeling like crap -- well, feeling like I *always* felt much of my life but was unaware food was the cause of it.

I considered having a symbolic funeral, replete with weeping and gnashing of teeth. I know my gluten intolerance has probably contributed to a dairy intolerance, especially since I've eaten them together all my life. Still there is nothing sadder.

Did this lead to the responsible adult perspective that I would immediately cease ingesting dairy since it is clearly bad for me? Of course not. It did however lead to me telling myself that I would limit my coffee (which I cannot ingest without cream and sweetener) to twice a week (that's all I've had for the last months anyway so that's no hardship), and limit cheese to maybe once a week rather than often daily.

On the bright side, some inner determined part of me abruptly decided to stop eating bad oils. This is odd as I've never cared too much about that before. But there've been quite a variety of things the last couple weeks -- condiments, dressings, jar'd sauces -- that I wanted to eat and some part of my just put its foot down and said NO. I WILL NOT INGEST THAT. Gosh, maybe I could borrow this aspect to deal with the dairy issue. Anyway, it's been made easier by only eating once a day for sure since I'm not scrambling for "how many variations on MEAT" you can come up with in a day, every day.

Weight > I can't really count my weight. I'm still losing some water weight, which I feel like should have happened faster, but maybe cheese is partly to blame. Technically I'm down around 18 pounds from where I started two weeks ago, but until I'm down about 25 I do not consider it past the "just water weight point," so I am still waiting for that to finish and actual weight loss to consider kicking in.

Energy > The biggest point of reference in my life is how much energy I have to do things. I've been VERY excited that my body is willing to let me eat VLC (>30 usually <15) carbs a day again. But it's been two weeks and I have yet to feel that 'official' shift 'into ketosis' that we all remember from our early days on LC. The one where suddenly you have so much energy than you have had until then, and you can taste and smell the ketones, and so on. It's been 14, 15 days now, and this still has not arrived for me. Now, I'm pretty sure the body is somewhat ketogenic from LC let alone VLC with IF, by day1, let alone day 15. If my body wasn't somewhat ketogenic, I would have had the same effect I had for a couple years when I tried to eat under about 50 carbs a day -- my body would instantly have demanded I eat carbs or die. So it seems obvious that my body IS using fat as an energy source. It seems ridiculous to say I am not ketogenic, I must be, to be my size and be eating so few carbs and even few calories most the time. But my energy level has been 'different'. Now it used to be -- still is -- that if I am high carb, esp. if there is any grains or many sugars in my diet, I have no energy. None. Not, "gee it's a chore to do chores," but, "I have sat so still I could be in a coma, barely breathing even, for 16 hours, having moved only one or twice to go to the bathroom briefly." Since I went VLC, I've felt two things at once, which is very odd. First, my body thanks to better protein, feels much stronger. My body thanks to fewer carbs, feels much less bloated, more limber. My mind thanks to fewer toxins, feels more clear. Now normally, if I were VLC in the past and ketogenic, these things would be accompanied by feeling REALLY energetic. But now, although I have these effects and feel far more energetic than 'normal' eating, although I feel stronger, clearer, more limber, basically better in nearly every way -- I feel WEARY. So it's not like "I feel weak and lacking energy" which is the normal state of things. It's more like, "I feel strong and healthy -- and yet, like I'm SO weary and exhausted and need rest." That's kind of novel. I keep waiting for 'real' ketosis to kick in. Maybe my body cannot do that anymore. I don't know. Cycles > I have been tracking a few things since mid to late September. How much energy I feel on an overall day, from 1 to about 2-, with the top being 'no-sleep manic' and the bottom being 'completely non-functional', and about 9-15 being the good zone of middling-normal. What my eating was like on a given day, 0 being fasting, 3-5 being VLC-IF, 10 being LC, 15 being HC, 20 being some crazy binge like eating pizza and birthday cake (or halloween candy, sigh).

I can already see clearly that when my food stopped fluctuating wildly, my energy stopped doing that too. I also see in the graph that nearly every time my food is high, my energy was low. And usually the food comes later in the day, so it's the energy sparking the food intake, not the other way around. The other two things I'm tracking for my "cycles" chart is menses, and what I call 'bright' -- a humorous reference to sexual energy, or 'bright ideas'. It's pretty interesting to see this graph starting to take shape, and see the not precise but clear 'cycles' of all these things and how they might relate to one another.

Medical health > I decided to add to my tracking the following things: 1) glucose levels, and 2) temperature. I am not sure this will be anything unusual or worth noting, but I thought it might be interesting. I have a Relion Ultima blood glucose meter, little ouchy pokey things I forget the word for, and the blood strips. I've used this before when I was VLC and having serious 'reactive hypoglycemic' effects after losing a lot of weight fast (where a breakfast like bacon and eggs could make my blood sugar drop so low after awhile I nearly passed out), but I think that probably resolved itself over time as I don't think I have that effect now.

I am not sure precisely when I should test my temp and my glucose although I've asked around a bit. I only eat in one period of the day. Do I test it after the first time I eat? After the last time? If I tested during that window but I'd eaten again that would throw it off, right. At what time-points should I be testing? What should I be recording about the food I ate -- everything? I mean I record all my food but I haven't been worrying about figuring out any 'specific' count when I, say, stir-fry chicken in bacon grease or coconut oil and throw in some shredded cabbage. God only knows what that would come into, if I psychically knew how much fats got its way down my throat out of all that and half the kid takes. I just estimate super roughly, not exactly. And what about temp? When I first wake up I think, before I get outta bed, right? Is there any other time that matters? Does temp have any relation at all to food intake?

The kid has been repeatedly trashing her eating plan with this, and then that, and then this other, and to her it feels like she's been on the plan for two weeks with a few cheats, but from my perspective if it's a rather major cheat and it happens 3x a week then she might as well forget about the plan being all that helpful. Yes, helpful in that it would be worse without it, but that doesn't mean she's necessarily going to lose weight. That said she seems visibly to have lost a tiny bit in the hips anyway. Not on the scale though.

Well, that's that. Midnight starts a new week. I hope it moves along fine and I find some kind of curry option I like. I'd love to see if I could make a cold curried chicken salad the way the thai restaurant back home (Ventura CA) did. Hope y'all have a good week too.

PJ

Intermittant Sanity

2010-10-21T06:00:00.004-05:00

When I first began serious lowcarb -- devoid of much info about nutrition or what ought to qualify as 'real food' vs. 'that will probably kill you too' but at least it was low on carbohydrates -- I wanted to try Intermittant Fasting.

I had protein requirements, at the time. As I mentioned in Don't Have A Cow, Man!, they were pretty significant. And as I sadly concluded in IF only I could do IF and still get enough protein, it just wasn't working for me trying to do "induction" and at the same time get "enough" nutrients and at the same time only eat once a day.

Over the last few years I've been through so many variants I'm totally losing track. High protein! High fat! Carb Cycling! VLC! ZC! LC with fruit! with grains! with legumes! Go Team Go!

All of these work for people. Nearly every imaginable variant of eating plan appears to be working for at least someone, and often many someones, and often those someones have lost a LOT of weight and have kept it off a long time and their health markers are great -- so who can argue with success?

Yet I think it's safe to say if any of those truly worked for me in the LONG run, I'd be somewhere different today. Well, wait. I don't mean that I've been perfect with something and it failed -- that wouldn't be fair to say, ok, I utterly suck as the poster child for "consistency" when it comes to good eating, and I cannot fairly represent ANY eating plan as a result. But clearly nothing was eternally right for me.

SOME of these things like mostly-meat/eggs/cheese VLC worked really *well* for a period of time at least. I felt fantastic on VLC and lost a lot of weight and felt strong and everything was just rocking. Until suddenly I didn't feel ok let alone good anymore, and couldn't do it at all without my body feeling like if I didn't eat carbs within minutes it would be a disaster.

Weight lifting would stop abruptly, mid-move, when my body suddenly said my battery was on E, although sometimes it would stop and I would burst into tears, feeling literally panicked. I honestly thought I had some inexplicable emotional problem for awhile. I searched for any possible internal emotion to connect to that, and of course, I found it -- see, confirmation bias works in psychology not just science! Hey, this super-morbidly-obese person DOES have a few things that cause them great emotion related to their body; gee, who knew? (Oh brother.)

I finally realized this was my body's reaction to a sense of huge immediate crisis, I mean perceived as nearly life and death. Maybe in the wild of history when we were running from that predator once upon a time, it really WAS that degree of issue: find a solution within 10 seconds or you'll die from your body, never mind the tiger.

I tend to ignore my body. I'm sure that is somehow related to my size, or maybe that gradually caused it. I tend to put off eating, even peeing, or even realizing I have some kind of ache or pain, until it is SO severe it's ridiculous. Whatever I am doing, I am utterly focused on that, and if that is my plan (write code for this file, lift this weight), almost nothing else even comes into my conscious awareness if it does not support that goal. If I am actually trying to do something "despite anything else" that's even more pronounced. My kid will walk into my room and say, "Mom, you're bouncing. Go pee!" I won't have even NOTICED if I'm doing something that takes focus.

So that means I ignored the feelings of growing panic when I was lifting and abruptly ran TOTALLY out of energy, and finally I burst into tears, which DID get my attention and make me stop!

It was at least a year before I realized that I should have recognized this pattern. When I was a kid, my dad (just a little passive/aggressive) used to tickle me, and I'd beg him to stop and he wouldn't -- it was more abuse than play from my perspective -- and sometimes to the point of making me pee my pants, then he'd be all mad and disgusted with me. (To this day I cannot abide ANY degree of tickling. None. Violence will follow almost immediately if it does not stop on command. I mean I'm a complete freak about it, sigh.) So after enough of that, I would struggle until I couldn't struggle anymore, and then at some feeling of crisis, my body would just burst into bawling all at once. Although this also pissed him off, it had the immediate effect of solving the problem I couldn't solve with physical strength or pleading.

Once I realized the previous weightlifting sudden-bawling was a crisis-response, it was a long time later by then, but the next time I spent some time lifting (just a few weeks) I paid attention, and I felt it coming then--once I knew that "working hard" when you're "working out" does not mean "ignoring all obstacles for the goal." If the obstacle is your body telling you that you may die if you don't stop, that's one worth listening to. :-)

I feel like it's time for me to get back to that and see what is needed with carbs or fats or protein or _______ to make serious lifting possible for me. I really love it.

Back to my original point. A good deal of what works for you isn't just what makes you healthier on paper or during the moments you do it, it's what you can LIVE WITH long enough to accomplish something more enduring.

I was remembering the other day how I was told as a kid, "Come out of the rain before you catch a cold!"

If rain gave you illness, showers and swimming would kill us all. This is one of the zillion myths we grow up with. Maybe having a poor immune system and standing in cold rain long enough to lower your body temp a lot is bad, fine. That is not rain's fault. Rain on its own is mostly harmless and even warm in some climates.

That got me thinking on what other no-brainer myths I might be living with all the time. Sorting through a surprisingly long list of possibilities, I came up with this particular dilemma, which I worked over in my head for awhile:

1. Allegedly the body can only hold protein for 3 hours. After which it eats YOU (goes catabolic). This is behind the old weight thing about eating every 3 hours, even if it means waking up in the middle of the night.

By 'natural inclination' I have spent most of my life eating once a day, at night -- this resulted in weight gain in some settings (my initial huge gain came that way) and a simple no-weight-loss in others (much of my life, despite being huge) -- so I am always trying to fight against this natural tendency to just not want to deal with food much.

I have often told myself I should give IF a real try now, a few years later, given it would simply my food life so radically (since everything I eat I have to cook or prep). But then I think, "But wait, no! That's what made me gain weight, that never helped me lose weight, and I don't want my body eating my muscles!"

2. But what little research I've read about related to intermittant fasting shows that it works surprisingly well for many and it does not appear to drain people of their muscle and vital organs at advanced pace, as #1 makes it seem like would be the case.

So does your body 'start eating itself' at 3:01 from last bite? Or does it not? Or does it do so, but to such a small degree it doesn't matter? Or are there other facets of brief-duration fasting that compensate for this? Is it like worrying about some free-radicals from foods while ignoring that NOT eating them has vastly worse consequences for you?

Edited to add:
A great post addressing these questions, I found a few hours after this post, here:
http://www.leangains.com/2010/10/top-ten-fasting-myths-debunked.html
I'm really enjoying that blog.

I thought about all this a little more. I would eat once a day and then I was REALLY hungry when that finally arrived. So I'd eat a bunch of gluten-stuffed, bad-oils-stuffed something like 'whole wheat pasta with just some (corn) oil and vinegar and herbs' and wonder why I wanted to eat a truckload of it or why it never seemed to help (my protein-starved 300-500# frame). Or I'd just eat fast-food instead, which at least gave me some protein, but added fructose-stuffed big drinks, massive sodium and sometimes enough MSG to fry my brain as a food of its own.

So in thinking about this, I think it's fair to say that I canNOT say that my 'eating once a day' in the past qualifies in ANY way as the "intermittant fasting" that is recommended by some people in the paleo/lowcarb fields.

My kid and I just spent 10 days staying somewhere else while our bathroom was under reconstruction. For dysfunctional former-family living-space reasons I will not bore you with, we had no options but frozen food we could nuke (that was the least of our misery). I was kinda mad about that, but it was only supposed to be 6 days, which gradually became 10 days, and I figured what the heck, I'll live. At this point, we don't have much money, but we are back home, the good food I had evolved into new lifeforms while I was gone, we have some stuff in the freezer, and I told her I am only buying basically meat/eggs/produce a little dairy. Nothing makes me want 'real food' more than not being able to have it!!

So humorously, I spent a good deal of time fantasizing about 'real food' (in particular MEAT) and wanting to come up with a 'plan' to carry out for maybe a month, just to see what the results might be if I actually did:

1. Intermittant fasting (say, a 3-hr window for food once a day in the evening)
2. Supplementation (need to keep that up)
3. Focus on decent water intake (instead of diet soda)
4. Doing a little working out, slow to start, again.

I'm not so much looking for pounds lost because just dropping carbs will do a lot of that, and if I start lifting again that will add some of it. I'm more looking to see, after a month of this, how I feel at the end of it. I'd like to answer questions for myself like:

1. Is IF feasible for me for appetite reasons?
2. Is IF feasible for me for schedule reasons?
3. Is IF feasible for me for the-teen's-food reasons?
4. What kind of protein/fat/carb intake can I have off that eating window? You can only eat so much at a time... and
5. Is the intake I can have enough to keep me functioning well, keep me from cravings, keep me decently fortified?

My kid (daughter R, 14) has issues eating at school. She is doing this with me. We concluded that maybe rather than eating once a day, we should eat twice a day: once around 7am, protein+fat so hopefully she can last through school and not be too tempted by their 100-deadly-fried-grain foods, and then we'd eat again around 7pm.

We talked about food options. She loves salad and needs less protein than I do. So we thought, "protein and fats for breakfast" so she'd be full and satiated and hopefully would stay full-enough through the day; we'd pack her a bottle of water and some nut/cheese snacks in her packback.

And then for dinner, a BIG salad, with diced chicken and hard boiled egg and homemade blue cheese dressing. Yes I realize this is cheese/dairy and very caloric, but it's damn tasty. It will give her the veggies she loves and some meat. Plus some kind of plain meat-thing for me (simple small burger patty or something) so I get a little more protein/calories in than her if needed. Water, no soda (maybe a rare diet-soda treat but in general, just water).

Edited to add: I forgot to mention that she's also moving to a split sleep schedule. Around 11:45pm to 6am, and 3:45pm-6:45pm. So she will get up, food is fairly close to that, and she has several hours awake that it should last her, and then another sleep cycle. She simply cannot seem to deal with sleeping at an hour to get her anywhere enough sleep--like me (maybe because of growing up with me), she just is not remotely sleepy at that point--but she is weary after school and can nap. So this "two sleep and two food times" a day is part of a single-plan.

It would be helpful to me to have some ideas though. Do any of you guys do IF?

If so, what all -- and how much -- do you eat during your window (and what is that)?

What about eating twice a day? (7am/7pm) Is that too often to count/matter?

What about coffee/teas with cream? This is 'food' not drink, right?

What about target quantities and ratios for protein/fat/carbs -- do these change with IF?

Even from those who don't do IF, ideas are welcome!

Our official experiment is 4 weeks, starts Saturday October 23, 2010 and is ended Saturday November 20. She leaves for Maui the next day so it's good timing for her.

Any advice is appreciated. Now I wish I'd paid more attention to this subject over the years when it has flown by. I wasn't doing it, so I didn't really follow the info about it, darn it!

PJ

Pesto Salad v1.0

2010-10-07T14:23:00.006-05:00

When finished, it looks attractively like glop.
Tastes good, though.

If it's fast and tasty, it's my kind o' food.

This is just a simple thing I threw together that I thought was yummy. Kid doesn't like pesto. I have been eating once a day separately from her so it's a chance for me to eat the things I like that she doesn't (read: that's nearly everything).

dairy-free, gluten-free, high-protein, high-fat

6 hard boiled eggs
6oz cooked chicken breast, diced (you could probably use shrimp if you prefer)
6 scallions, diced
7 oz pesto
1 small jalapeno pepper, diced
~1/3 large red bell pepper, diced

Mix it together. Eat it. This is cooking at my level for sure!.

Servings:
normal world: 6
my normal world: 4

Click the numbers image to pop up one large enough to read.

Food versus "Food" for Breakfast

2010-10-06T20:24:00.005-05:00

Low-carb seems pretty reasonable, healthy and do-able until you are wrangling with a 14 year old 8 minutes before she's got to be out the door to school.

Much of the time I make her a scramble, or an omelette. She doesn't like eggs much and tends to not eat more than a bite, sadly, to make me feel better. Sometimes I make grilled sliced kosher dogs or gourmet sausages (the apple-gouda or jalapeno-jack or chili or cheddar types). She doesn't really like that either. (Had I put them in a bready bun with ketchup and mustard, ok, but sliced and grilled, no.)

Sometimes I make her a mock -- slang for a sort of distinctive food-ish-thing you make in a microwaveable bowl. 1 egg, 1+ oz of cream cheese depending on how much you really want to eat it as cheesecake, some flavorings, spices, sweeteners, a drop of fresh fruit puree, broken pieces of dark chocolate bar, whatever. Soften cream cheese, stir with everything else, you can leave little chunks of the cheese, then nuke -- in my microwave it's about 1.5 minutes, might vary. Note that this can also be done savory with leftover chicken and rosemary, or cumin and taco meat, or crisped pepperoni and shredded mozz, or whatever. The sky's the limit. Over at the ACL forum (lowcarber.org) "kitchen" board there are a couple threads on "mock danish" and "bowl muffins" that probably have 200 variants. Some add almond or coconut or flax meal... depending on your ingredients this can range from a heavy muffin to bread pudding in texture, from an instant chocolate cake rather molten in middle to a garlic-caraway-flax-thing you can put a topping on.

I normally avoid things like the above because years of low-carbing refocused me on "whole foods." Well, mostly. I did mention previously that I'm relaxing more than I used to and being willing to do some processed meats and such for the sake of time/ease and that seeming better than ending up offplan entirely.

The one I made the other morning had some sweetzfree and truvia for sweetener, 1 egg, 3oz cream cheese, a little bit of pineapple extract, and a small handful of chopped toasted macademia nuts (from the bag in the baking aisle in market). She said it was fabulous. I felt guilty because it was 'sweet' and it seems like breakfast shouldn't be sweet. What is that? I don't know where that guilt came from. Like if it's sweet or you really enjoy it, it's the moral equivalent of a cinnamon roll, it must be bad!

Food for her is really a pain! She doesn't like the meat/eggs much and that is what I am just fine with and gravitate to. She likes veggies but often only if drowning in something like a dressing.

Tonight I sauteed a little bacon in tiny pieces, a bunch of crimini mushrooms, and some sliced leftover baked chicken, and then gave her a tiny bowl of butter for dipping the rather dry chicken. She said it was fab. I was trying to think of what would be better for her than the (bad-oils) ranch we currently have, I guess that worked.

I had my parents get me a big chunk from a roll of Amish butter recently. Honestly I did not taste anything improved over store butter and in fact I think I liked the taste slightly less. I'm sure it's healthier though. At 4x the price it should be.

An online buddy gave me a recipe for a morning smoothy the kid might like, which reminded me that we have protein powder and frozen berries and, as soon as I replenish a couple more jars to bring it back to life fully, kefir.

Part of me says this isn't food. I dunno, does chopping something to tiny bits in a blender make it less food? If the ingredients were eaten separately would it seem more like food? If there wasn't a bit of sweetener (which may be its own food-karma but aside from that, what's wrong with the rest of any given thing?) would it seem more like food?

It seems like I have a lot of belief systems that reduce me to chicken, burgers, pork loins, roasts, occasional dogs or sausages, bacon, eggs, some fresh produce (very limited), frozen berries, sometimes some nuts or seeds, and some dairy (mostly butter and cheese and homemade kefir). To me this is fine. Although it does explain why I tend to not eat, or eat super lowcarb and nearly paleo, or eat offplan, without much in between. To my 14 year old, this is so boring that it's nearly a punishment. So for her sake I am trying to branch out. Branching out into things less perfectly healthy seems like a contradiction, when the whole point is making her food at home so she eats less crap at school.

Sometimes it's hard for me to tell where food crosses the line to "food". If I nuke her sweet mocks and make her sweet or chocolaty protein drinks, am I teaching her 'diet food' that is not a long term eating strategy? Am I feeding her a lowcarb version of junkfood?

Or am I being reasonably practical about feeding a teenager who often has an entire 0.8 minute to scarf down something? (Because, as I tell her, she is the slowest human alive, the moreso the more she NEEDS to hurry!) Who if she doesn't have something decent at breakfast will spend a fortune on food so horrifying at school that it looks like an institutionalized advertisement for the bad-oils and grain lobbies?

I can't decide. Tomorrow I'm going to try a protein drink for her. We'll see how that goes.

Cooking Ahead

2010-10-03T18:25:00.007-05:00

I felt like such a whiner after my last post. I nearly deleted it but it had already hit RSS and feedburner so I didn't bother. Many thanks to the commenters for being so kind and supportive. Actually, I have to say the lowcarb community is probably the most friendly genre of the several I've been in online over the last 17 years!

F O O D F O O D F O O D

So after thinking about it I decided the first and primary problem is that if I get lazy or work too much so I'm not prepared, I end up running out of food that is decent to eat or that doesn't take eons. Worse, it only takes going without food for awhile or even worse eating badly, to ensure I have no energy for a major cooking job anyway. I know what I can do, should do, I know a whole list of steps that are ideal for making this sort of thing easier, but following them is another story!

The Cook-Ahead Plan:

Chicken breasts are easy.

Last week I cooked 5# of chicken breasts ahead and used them in stuff all week.

Stir-fried veggies are a little more time consuming. But versatile.

Then at some ungodly hour Monday morning-Sunday night, I used the wok to sautee onions, peppers, sliced zucchini, sliced yellow squash, and sliced crimini mushrooms. I dislike veggies. I can eat peppers in any way, and tomatoes in most, and I love mushrooms sauteed, but if I'm to eat zukes or squash, it will only be sauteed so it kinda blends in with other stuff. I make zero effort to eat anything outside this group.

I use organic nonhydrogenated palm shortening from tropicaltraditions.com on this. I only buy the gallon if it's on sale, when it's about half price, or I just can't afford the stuff at all. I love it though--it imparts a 'warmth' but has no real taste, is more solid than bacon grease at room temp but softer than coconut oil, and has a really high smoke point so is ideal for stir-fry. I have a slightly oversized grease-holder on the counter that I keep full of the stuff.

I'm wondering if adding it (melted but not hot) to bacon grease for homemade mayo would work. I'm not sure what the real diff is between the shortening and the oil.

I put the veggies in a storage bowl and Monday nuked a little and dropped it inside an omelette for the kid's breakfast. Tuesday did the same thing and made one for me. And Thursday I used the remainders, pureed with some water in the blender, to add to my beef stock and spiced tomato sauce/paste soup. (Even just sauteed mushrooms dropped in are awesome with that.) Friday we added shredded baked chicken and let it simmer a long time, and then it was gone. We serve that soup with some cream mixed in the bowl on serving... it's wonderful.

That worked very well as a 'food ahead'. I had thought of cooking actual 'food' ahead like the chicken, but hadn't before given too much thought to cooking 'ingredients' ahead. That worked out really well and gave me some options. For example I could have shredded a chicken breast, added some of the veggies, heated it up in a small sautee pan, and then put some pepperjack cheese over the top till melty. That would have been good too. There's lots of options.

I am hoping to do another batch of fresh veggies in the wok tonight, for this coming week.

Mountains of Pork

Today I prepped 11 pounds of pork loin for my big 8.5 quart crockpot. I am making carnitas meat. I've never done this before. I usually make chili verde with the pork, but it requires cubing it -- a huge process as there is a lot of meat -- then braising it, yet more work -- then sauteeing the onions and peppers -- all before I can even turn on the crockpot. With the carnitas recipe, I just had to add a bunch of spices to chicken stock, I cut the 5.5# loins into 5 pieces each, and put in the pot and walked away. I'm cooking it a long time, because the pork loin (as opposed to tenderloin) is a lot tougher. I have these "bear claw" things I got from amazon.com long ago (to make carnitas, ironically, and I have never done so until now!) that makes short work of shredding meat.

Oh yeah. I thought the freezer Ziploc was chicken stock but it turned out it was beef stock. Whoops. So we will see how this is with beef stock. Actually, I had one 14.5oz can chicken stock I'd already added, and what was probably a little over a quart of the beef stock, and then a bunch of water (as my recipe was for 3# and I had 11#, and it had 4 cups of ckn stock). I am sort of infamous for my inability to make any recipe just as-is but this time truly it's just that I was mistaken about what I had on hand. The beef stock smelled pretty good (from one of my roasts) so I hope it still comes out ok!

Need some chicken stock. Maybe a stew while I'm at it.

I have the other half of a dozen chicken drumsticks to cook. I don't like drumsticks. But, they were really cheap at 4.5# for $5. So I figured I will roast them, fork off just the most obvious meat, use that to make something like a pesto chicken salad (or to add to omelettes for the kid before school in the morning), and then throw all the drumsticks into a stock pot. So there'd be some roasted meat and bones. I don't know how well this will work because I've never done it before. But I feel like I need to make a better attempt to learn to cook the less expensive stuff.

I've back-slid on my kefir.

My kefir's been in stasis in the fridge for quite a long time. I rinsed it off and put it in a fresh jar with some milk. I will have to do a few milk changes (not drinking that) to get them back to decent health I imagine, but I have hope. I would like to use kefir to make the occasional berry dessert -- I don't want to ingest 'milk' unless it's kefir. I read everything I could find about gut bacteria and it seemed like a good thing.

I read this article about gut bacteria. They found that (don't read this if you're eating) an actual injection of a bit of the feces of a healthy person into the large intestine of someone who is not, can have astounding effects, as the bazillions of bacteria colonize and can change the gut bacteria in a major way. I don't have any healthy donors to get that gross with me unfortunately (I can just imagine asking someone for this. Haha!), and kefir may well die in the stomach for all I know (if even a tad bit survives, it's worth it), so that's what I have for now.

Tonight's Dinner

I found this thing in the jar section called "Vodka Sauce." (Tomatoes, cheese, vodka, herbs.) It sounded good. There was a ridiculously expensive "home made Rao's" version so I thought I would try that. I cut up some organic boneless/skinless chicken thighs into small pieces (quite small) and mixed it in that in a pyrex square baking pan and I'm cooking it for an hour. I didn't know what else to do with it... I don't eat pasta, after all, which was the only reference on the jar. I did add a tiny bit of italian herb seasoning, and 2 diced garlic cloves sprinkled about, and just a few red pepper flakes, to it before baking. I hope it's decent. If it is, I will look into how to make my own homemade "vodka sauce." I am not real big on the taste of spaghetti sauce (not without pasta under it anyway :-)) but maybe I'll like this better. It's in the oven.

I'm hoping that all this effort means I eat well this week.

Oh yeah. I did lose a lot of water weight... 16# of it the last 7 days (current weight 404, from 420). This is not unusual by the way, so it's no big deal -- I carry about that much or more water if I'm eating high carb.

I certainly feel more limber, and energetic, as a result. Getting a lot of exercise even though the restroom is across the hall... going back on LC, for me, is a rather trying period of running to the loo every short while!

PJ

Mellowing with Age

2010-09-27T01:38:00.001-05:00

Over time I got to where I was wiping out so many foods from my diet--and I've little experience with most any food that is 'real' so not much variety was left--that instead of feeling enthused about recipes and issues, the way I did when I began this blog a few years ago, I just felt kinda demoralized. Like, even if I were eating on plan, how could my plain burgers and plain baked chicken breasts be of interest to anybody else?

Despite my occasional success with my teen, the most common event is that she doesn't want to be on lowcarb and whether via drama-queen or pleading, eventually I make the lousy decision to agree with her 'somewhat' and then slide completely off the wagon, UNDER the wagon.

As my insane weight when I began all this makes clear, my metabolism is not particularly normal. Normal people do not weigh 520, not ever. I lost a lot of weight, not remotely enough, but I'm still pretty huge. And I don't really need to eat horribly to gain weight. I just need to eat. But it's worse because if I'm not pointedly eating lowcarb, which amounts to 'mostly fats/protein', it's not merely that I'm eating carbs, it's that I'm not eating protein, and eventually I will start to overeat, simply because my body's starving for amino acids. I know that by now. Why this is ever still a problem is beyond me.

I considered not posting. Figured maybe I should close the blog and forget it. Being somewhat Type-A in personality, I would sooner gets shots and bruises than confess to any weakness, or be forced to spend any time around medical places. I think it's important if one's going to blog for a given 'thing' -- lifestyle, food choice, whatever -- that they be a positive and decent example of it.

Right now I'm kind of an example of someone who got demoralized, gave up, got it together again, then screwed up / got careless, shrugged it off, kinda forgot about it on purpose for awhile, repeated several times and several different approaches, and then realized I felt horrible, I was fatter, and had gained enough weight to make my eyeballs fall out on the scale, bounce a couple times and roll across the floor. I'm shocked and horrified it's that much. I honestly didn't think it would be that much.

So I can't decide if I should wallow in my pathetic failing so much that I just close the blog and let people who can actually maintain the eating plan as good examples do this, and spare people my clearly imperfect example, or if I should just get over myself and start where I am and use the blog to force myself to pay more attention for awhile, to what I eat, to issues, to positive thinking about it all.

Emotionally I want to do the former, but intellectually I know it would be healthier to do the latter.

***

Meanwhile, I noticed tonight that I must be mellowing with age. Tonight I stir-fried a bunch of stuff to dump into omelettes or on burgers over the next 2-3 days. Zucchini, squash, anaheim chilies, white onion, portabella mushrooms, a small red potato. I would not previously have allowed the potato. But the kid likes them. Small amounts of small ones now and then are my little compromise.

I am working on being less extremist. Less of the "I MUST eat X and I CANNOT eat Y" and more of the "PJ, just plan something to eat that is relatively decent and move on. Nobody is going to die over 7 slices of potato mixed into a big bowl of other veggies, only a big spoon of which is used with any meal serving. If this small compromise helps the kid like it a little better, and it's not severely harmful, isn't her being content on LC more important?"

Will people relate to me? Or find it pitiful and embarrassing? (More likely, not a single person reads this blog anymore because I went so long without posting, sigh.) I don't know. But I always wanted to be honest here so there you have it.

I'm getting more mellow with age. But I'm also just going back on plan after a chunk of time that added a whole bunch of weight back to my frame. Ironically, just after I had the FIRST sign of possible weight loss I'd had in a couple of years, after the hyper-nutrient phase. I feel like a complete freakin idiot, a failure, and a horrible example. But, I'd like to do better. I did well for a long time before gaining back what I recently have.

Teenage Low Carb, Part 2

2010-04-24T16:27:00.018-05:00

"Why is there no cream cheese?"
"I dunno."
"Did you eat all the cream cheese?"
"I don't remember."
"Well who did??"
"I dunno."
"There are only two of us living here! It wasn't me. So..."
"I was hungry!"
"You're always hungry!"
"Yes! I am! So what!"

It's the Mystery of The Disappearing Yummy Foods.

Now, Regina Wilshire once counseled me: Don't deprive a growing child of nutrient-foods; their body drives them to intake nutrients so they have what they need to grow. They need to have free access to the healthy foods so they can eat as needed.

I agree that seems like a sound philosophy.

But what do you do when the growing child only wants to eat all the peanut butter and cream cheese and any possible yummy snack (even homemade LC stuff), instead? In the night? Without mentioning it?

So I go to make something that for example has a little cream cheese, a quick meal on a break from work, and discover that while I bought half a dozen 8oz blocks of the stuff not long before, we now have... count them... none.

And while I don't tend to put much emphasis on calories as long as the carbs are kept low, the reality is that an 8oz block of cream cheese has 765 calories and 17g sugar carbs -- her eating it like candy with a spoon is unlikely to result in visible fat loss anytime soon, that's for sure.

But if I don't keep such things in my house, if I can't have any 'ingredients' like that lest they all disappear in the night, then MY diet totally sucks. It's not that I eat it a lot. But sometimes I want to have it around, dang it! I already have a diet which, compared to the cultural norm, is profoundly restricted. I already don't really care for veggies or fruits so they're minimal, don't eat grains or legumes at all, I despise seafood, must avoid gluten, and work to maintain low-carb. Sheesh, the food segment of the universe I have access to is not real broad anyway. It's important that I be able to make a quick bowl muffin or whatever it might be. When I do NOT eat, THAT is when I end up making "poor decisions" that take me offplan. When I feel angry and deprived, that doesn't help either.

It doesn't have to be this food item. It's less the specific than the overall point. Versatility and variety is really important when you're a full time job single mom trying to survive an eating plan where nearly everything involves shopping prepping cooking cleaning.

I got bent out of shape about this, because it was so repetitive and it seemed like no amount of griping on my part changed it at all.

If we had stew (it doesn't matter what kind of stew really) that I made in a crockpot? -- she would add tons of cream and shred cheese to it. By the time she is done, it is not only not a particularly lowcarb stew, but it's got enough calories for two entire days of food. The kid never met a carb or a cheese she didn't like, but she also avoids ever learning to get used to and like many foods, because she buries it in so much crap you can't taste anything but that.

Although this issue is not completely solved, it is better than it used to be. Here's the things we did to improve it at least to the point where it is now.

1. When we eat, I make a point to be sure there are LOTS of proteins and fats involved in our food. Not just some. A LOT. Enough that in a perfect world, she is as stuffed as possible, and less likely to be wandering around the kitchen noshing the minute I'm not looking. If we're having roast beef or steak, I put lots of butter on it, or mix butter into any sauce, to add some fats and calories. If we are having hamburger patties, I make sure to make it a good size and add cheese. If we're having various kinds of chicken, and the fat is sometimes very low in those meals, I try to find something else to add to it. For example I don't eat legumes but I keep frozen peas around for her, so I'll make her some peas with tons of butter in them. If we're having scrambled eggs, I make sure hers have some cheese, and maybe some sour cream on top.

Now, you might notice that this is greatly amping up the carbs and especially calories, and it's possible that soft-dairy isn't the healthiest thing in the world (for me anyway, which means possibly for her, genetically). I would say it's almost certain that her weight loss has been slower as a result of my intentionally upping her protein and fat so she is intentionally FULL at any meal we have.

On the other hand, when I did not do this, she ate anyway -- she ate at every opportunity and when I wasn't looking -- and she didn't eat meat, she ate cream cheese, peanut butter, lowcarb treats, and so on -- and she didn't lose much of any weight AT ALL and in fact she GAINED some.

I think this kind of exemplifies the problem a lot of people have with 'dieting': they want to lose weight 'faster' so they try to eat strictly, but then they just end up noshing or binging and not losing much weight at all, or gaining it back bi-weekly. Being willing to lose fat more slowly, by upping the protein/fats intake, if it prevents a larger degree of intake (or worse choices) as the alternative, is obviously a better choice.

2. I try to keep things in the fridge available so she always has something she can eat, that she likes well enough... she is never hungry without reasonably quick-food. THIS effort has been hard but has been something I came to understand was critically important to her progress. And if that means that she is eating too many calories, munching on deli ham and provolone on lowcarb wraps with salad veggies added, well, that's what it means. At least she is eating something semi-healthy, something with protein/fat and minimal carb and usually some fresh produce added, rather than whole blocks of cream cheese or half a jar of peanut butter.

3. I've tried to make a point to involve more of what she obviously wants, into our food. For example once in awhile I'll just mix up some fresh berries and cream cheese and Truvia / Sweetzfree as a surprise dessert of sorts. Not all the time. But enough that she gets a few more 'treats' and so hopefully won't feel as 'deprived', psychologically. Also, then if I have to say, "Oh. I was going to make you a yummy berry dessert... but there's no cream cheese..." THEN she is really mad at herself for sneaking it all, and not telling me, and now she doesn't get something she really wants.

4. I came to understand that some of her frustration is that we are different. I needed to recognize that better. She needs/wants things I don't. I could live on almost pure meat, and I can eat the same thing repeatedly for a really long time till I'm sick of it. I absolutely love hot spicy food and eastern spices. She is not so fond of meat as me, she gets sick of things very easily and needs variety, she really likes vegetables and 'lighter' feeling foods, and she likes cold-creamy things sometimes as a break from meat all the time. So I started making more things like chicken and hard boiled egg salad, with scallions and dill relish, mayo and mustard. It's cold, it's yummy, it's still got lots of proteins and fats (and if I get to the point finally of making my own mayo, decent fats then), but she feels like it's a nice change from "chicken or beef or eggs, chicken or beef or eggs" all the time.

5. I INSIST that she have a couple bites of any food without sauces, cheeses, etc. that she wants to add on beyond whatever I cooked. And I insist on hovering and nagging about not so MUCH cheese or sauce. It's annoying to both of us and a pain for both of us, but it does result in her tasting more actual food, and reducing some of the drown-it behavior, which I think over time has, actually, made her more open to the actual taste of food.

6. I quit making the foods she abused the worst, even though I love them and she liked them... only when drowning in cream cheese (such as chili, for example). The reality is, if she can't eat it without 6 ounces of cream cheese melted into that bowl, then SHE DOESN'T LIKE IT, ok. So unless I really don't mind that she's having chili "and cheesecake" for dinner, in quantity, I simply don't make it much anymore.

7. I tamed my tendency to overcompensate with more 'fun' but less healthy food. It's been a dilemma in some respects. I want her to like the food. I want her to be happy. So for example, maybe I will make her a big mushroom with ham and swiss and some sweet mayo-mustard blend. Or maybe I will make some variant on a pizza-something. But I have to be careful with this, because then I end up making food that is a little too carby, a little too processed, a little too 'special' -- a little too often. Then we BOTH end up kind of craving carbs and having trouble. So lately, I have attempted to make the weekdays pretty simple and plain, "meat and eggs" (she can always have salad stuff too if she wants) basically, and then on Saturdays we focus on cold creamy salads and more specialty foods (Saturday is "salad day"), and Sunday is "Fun Day" -- I try to do some kind of experiment that she is part of, for an LC sweet, or just something we don't have very often, like yogurt, or flax muffins, etc.

8. I make a point to always have salad ingredients on hand. I've made a point to make her prep these enough times to feel comfortable with it. I showed her how to make vinaigrette as well as we usually have bottled ranch (soon to be homemade hopefully). So she can always make a salad when another meal of meat is just not doing it for her. Plus, she can always go add some diced tomatoes and onions, or some sliced tomatoes with salt, to any food, if she feels like it.

9. When all else fails, I make sure she suffers with me. I hate having fits. I don't want to live that way. I hate nagging. Actually there's a lot about parenthood that ticks me off. So rather than having a hissy fit about it, which leaves me angry, or saying little (or just griping) which leaves me resentful, I just became the Tough Mom. Guess who is walking to the store just to buy us more cream cheese, at some very inconvenient time? Guess who wouldn't have to do this if she didn't eat all or most of it in such a short time? Now while she's not in her cool clothes, while she really doesn't feel like it, the two sides of the equation, consuming it and replacing it, become her issue, rather than the 'problem' of it being only mine. So if it's going to be a frustrating pain in the butt for me, it's going to be one for her, too.

This is not happening if she eats some of it once in awhile, understand. Only when she's consuming all or nearly-all of something in short periods and/or not telling me when I/we are shopping so I can replace it. I'm not so much punishing her (indirectly) for eating, I'm doing it for being inconsiderate enough to eat it all without regard to me, my food plans, my meal food plans for both of us, my shopping plans, etc. I don't mind her eating it now and then. Sure, I would much rather she ate it IN something reasonable, like a bowl muffin for example, than just ate it plain.

But I'm not going to freak out if sometimes she just really has a desire to eat. So do I sometimes, and I don't ask her permission for everything I feel like munching on, and I don't make her ask me (I did, or tried, when she was a bit younger). What I also expect however is for her to be responsible, and to be considerate and aware of the fact that her wiping out any food resource causes problems for me. I don't always have money for more. Or time to get it. Or transportation to get it. Sometimes I'm up at midnight on a Saturday and I want to do a fun experiment on some lowcarb item and I'm SO irked if it turns out we are out of an ingredient I was sure we had, as I have no way to get it.

But as you know, even ADULTS have serious problems keeping away from some foods. I didn't keep peanut butter in the house for like two months recently, not because of her, but because of me! I just kept eating the damn stuff with a spoon -- and often instead of meals. It was easier. Faster. Yummy and instant fat/protein. But it tends to spark some noshing cravings in me when other things don't, not to mention it does not constitute "real food". And the reality is, the more I'm NOT cooking an entire meal, the more I don't have any leftovers from that. Having 'foods you can't resist' seems to be an issue for lots of people and apparently that includes me too. It's simply that the "foods she is tempted by" are wide ranging, and include nearly everything in the "yummy" category that does not require serious prep and 20+ minutes of cooking.

I tell myself that since she is young, she has also just not had remotely the same amount of practice an adult has at 'doing without something you want' (especially as I have somewhat spoiled her in 'compensation' ways over time). She'll get there. I should be understanding that all things take practice and this no different than other things.

So I don't keep any kind of lowcarb junkfood around (like LC ice cream). Well, that's better anyway, we don't need that junk. And if I make some kind of LC treat, I make a fairly small amount that the two of us can eat, plus maybe one small meal of it after that at the most, so I don't have to worry about her plowing through a ton of it in the night.

And I try to keep up with the main list of things above:

Make her very full with protein/fat when we eat;
keep some kind of foods that she likes in the fridge or freezer so she can easily eat something decent-er if she suddenly wants to;
make treats of the things she likes best once in awhile, so she doesn't feel so deprived of them;
make variety in our meals so both the repetition and the 'heavy meat' feel are not so overwhelming to her;
make her taste the food to start adapting to it better;
avoid the foods she abuses worst;
avoid keeping LC "junkfood" around;
avoid making too-carby food too-often just to try and please her;
make weekdays super basic but designate weekends for novelty;
always keep salad/veggie food around she has total free access to;
and demand responsibility (and annoying results for her if not) for her helping me maintain 'food resources' I might want to eat or use in meals.

And you know what? A lot of this comes down to more work on MY part. More energy I have to come up with to plan, to buy, to prep, to cook, to clean, to make sure there's food for HER, not just me, and frankly keeping up with my own eating plan is hard enough.

I sometimes screw it up. Sometimes I'm lazy, or just incompetent. I'm working on my part. She's working on her part. It's not perfect yet. The cream cheese still disappears to those elves in the night sometimes. So does the peanut butter but sometimes that elf looks like me, uh oh. I forget sometimes that there's nothing to eat that doesn't take an hour of cooking so she's got limited choices if she gets hungry. So we're both a work in progress.

But we've gone from this being a chronic, insanely frustrating (even enraging) problem, one that seriously interfered with her success at lowcarb and weight loss, and even messed up my own eating plan at times, to this being a minor point that does not mess up our good relationship or available food very often.

PJ

Teenage Low-Carb, Part 1

2010-04-18T09:59:00.010-05:00

Most people have a fairly difficult time getting, and staying, on an eating plan that is significantly different than what they grew up with. Or, an eating plan that requires major changes to the lifestyle they hold. Even for adults, those "in control of" the money and food and cooking, there are many issues.

And then there's having a teenager! gah!

The way I see it, the issues fall into different categories. For example:

1. Planning. I used to eat when I was hungry which meant, "I'm hungry, let's buy some food somewhere." Now that I eat whole-foods, low-sugar, gluten-free, that isn't an option anymore. I actually have to think about it, well in advance usually, not only to shop so we have food on hand, but to defrost or otherwise plan ahead.

2. Shopping. My grocery shopping used to be a matter of walking through the store, choosing all the things that sounded good. Lots of pasta, lots of things in boxes and cans and frozen packages. Now the shopping is different and follows the 'borders' of the store. Fresh produce, then meat, then cheese, cream, eggs, then a very brief spot-check in the middle where we might pick up things such as canned olives or tomato paste. Everything we buy requires cooking, outside salads.

3. Prepping. Sometimes the seemingly simple foods take more time than the big things. I can spend 5 minutes throwing a roast and some details into the crockpot, and 4.5-6 hours later have dinner. But it can take us an hour to prepare a salad and dressing with some stir-fry chicken to dump into it. Cleaning and slicing and dicing simply takes time, and some foods require a linear process. My food prep used to consist of, "get in the car" or "take it out of the box". Now my food prep requires a decently clean kitchen, some counter space, and that both the above factors are already in place.

4. Cooking. I didn't start learning to cook until I was 40 and went low-carb. At 44 I am just starting to feel marginally competent. I can now make a steak and a roast that I love enough to rave about, after years of tough dry results. I now have enough recipes in my head to stand in the kitchen and "come up with something," whether familiar or new. We "experiment" regularly. The results are sometimes great, sometimes laughably bad, but usually edible and ok.

5. Cleaning. Being able to operate in my small kitchen requires it not be too messy. Cooking everything means that you've got a lot of dishes -- for every stage of prep, for the cooking itself, and for the eating usually. We do sometimes use paper plates and plastic spoons/forks, but most "real" food actually requires "real" dishes and silverware. My kitchen can go from immaculate to armageddon in the space of a couple meals. This is very time consuming, at the least. I have a housekeeping helper but I am gradually working on getting a good handle on keeping things clean as I go, and as we eat, so that it doesn't get to the point where I haven't got any dishes left by the time she arrives.

If you put all those things above together, what do they require? ENERGY. You have got to have energy to arrange any, let alone all, of those things. It is difficult enough for me to comfortably do all these things, but only when my protein is sufficiently high (>85g/day, preferably >100g/day) do I have the energy to do them. So my ability to pull off the eating plan is sometimes dependent on my ability to stay ON the eating plan -- and vice-versa of course. It's a cycle, and if I start to eat poorly, that cycle promptly becomes "a downward spiral," starting with my energy level.

In the middle of all this comes another complication, and a truly complicated complication to boot: my teenage daughter, R. She is 13 years old, and the greatest kid alive, but she has certainly had her own issues with eating well, and she has by proxy often done major damage to mine (it would be more appropriate to say, "I let myself be poorly affected"). Learning to adapt my healthy eating to something that she feels decently good on, she enjoys, she doesn't feel deprived with, as well as that she can help with, has added a Category Six to my eating plan:

6. Must suit the kid.

It has been a long road to getting us here. We have stumbled and tripped over every possible problem a mom and daughter can have with an eating plan, and stubborn behavior issues in both people. There is the frustration of a girl who wants to be fashionable and, just like all young women, has a lot of issues with body-related self-esteem, in our culture where anorexics are the representatives and fat people are made fun of. There is the horror of a mother who of all the things she wanted for her daughter, did NOT want her to have to deal with obesity, the most terrible challenge of her own life, but apparently figured it all out too late. By then, genetics plus womb-environ plus our food habits while she was a child, had already conspired to make her metabolically challenged, at best, at a young age.

It isn't fair, she has cried. It sucks!

Yeah, it does. But this is the way it is. Your friends can shovel unbelievable quantities of crapfood down their throats and still wear skinny jeans. You eat whole foods and almost no sugar and still struggle to eventually see the smallest bit of fat reduce. I agree that it's not fair. I agree that it sucks. But the one thing we have learned over time is that NOT doing anything about this only leads to a worse situation later.

Every time we were in denial. Every time we didn't want to deal with it. Every time I said oh fine then eat what your friends are eating. Every time it was so much easier to give in to a carb craving, only to end up eating 'whatever' for quite awhile before I got back to a strict whole-foods low-carb again... those times just added to the problem. Nobody got thinner during those times. And both of us got fatter. What started out a chubby issue became a fat issue.

.*.*.

When R was eight years old, she was getting a little chubby. I didn't worry about this, because I was chubby at age eight also. But it fell off me later as I grew. I have a picture of me at age 12 where I was clearly not fat at all. I got a little chubby again around 13, then it went away. I got a little chubby again around 15, then it went away. I didn't become morbidly obese until my early to mid 20s. So when I saw her getting chubby, I said, "Baby fat. She'll grow, and it will go away."

But I didn't have a morbidly obese mother with blood sugar issues. She didn't have the childhood that I did. She had a childhood filled with fast food and what was fast for a single working mom to make. She had a mother who weighed ~320 pounds when she gave birth, who had major blood sugar and blood pressure issues all through the pregnancy, and who blazed through pregnancy, nursing and the next dozen years of her life not realizing that she was constantly poisoning herself with gluten grains. She didn't have the same metabolism at age 8 as I did.

So she got chubby. Oh how cute. And then she got chubbiER. Wait a minute! And then she got mildly fat. Oh my gosh, should I "do" something? Will it make her feel bad about herself? She's beautiful, she's wonderful, I don't want her to think her mom of all people is judgemental about her! But they're making fun of her at school and she isn't fitting in the section of clothes she likes and she's unhappy and she doesn't have much energy. But I said little, waiting for her to make the decision she wanted to "do" something. I have friends whose moms put them on diets and it was horrible for them. I didn't want to be that mom.

Then for a brief miracle period, she decided: I want to be thinner! Back then I was eating very lowcarb, almost entirely meat. She ate with me. And she lost 5 pants sizes in record time. She was SO happy. Not thin, mind you. But back into jussssst barely 'normal' size.

But she went back to eating everything, and I didn't have the energy to make a big enough constant set of argument-fits to stop it. And she influences me, and I influence her, and the circle goes around. And time passed.

And she gained the weight back. She then went from mildly fat to basically just fat.

Ironically, by then, I had gotten nearly all the 'bad' food out of our house. I did not force her to eat low-carb though. I allowed her to have various treats. And to eat with friends. And to have carby things I didn't. And to have probably 'too much' of non-protein foods.

Of course, since she was still eating crappy food that sparks cravings and overconsumption, she just used my LC food to do it when at home. For example, cream cheese is pretty lowcarb. It's wonderful in many dishes and can be used to make a microwave muffin-ish-thing with an egg that is pretty decent if you're hungry. But I'd get up and discover a whole block (or two) of cream cheese gone. (Or worse yet, go to use it and find none, when I'd bought half a dozen not 10 days before.) You eat enough of anything that isn't meat and eventually it isn't lowcarb anymore, aside from which it has about a bazillion calories. There were other things but that was the big draw for her.

And she went from fat to morbidly obese. She weighed 235 pounds. She was 5 foot, 4 inches tall. She had no energy. And she was utterly miserable. She didn't want to leave the house lest she see someone she knew.

I knew that story too well myself. And I just wanted to separate into another body so I could beat the crap out of myself for letting it get to that point. I kept thinking it would be ok. She would GROW, dammit! Just like I did!! But she didn't. Oh sure, she grows taller. OK not much. But she just kept growing outward. I kept thinking that being a kid, her metabolism was mostly ok, and she would be fine, and she would grow out of it.

But her metabolism is not ok. It took about 8-10 years for her body to reach the same state of disaster metabolism that it took 24 years for my body to reach. And her reaction to gluten foods and milk sparks as much or more addictive eating in her as it ever did in me. There's a reason that Cheez-Its and Mac&Cheese were her favorite foods.

Her sweet little body has terrible stretch marks everywhere. She hadn't even had the chance to have 'a good body' before fat was scarring it for life. People were just horrible to her about her weight. She got depressed. She got mean sometimes. She just wanted to sleep sometimes. Life already sucked and she was only 12 years old.

.*.*.

So at that point, she "joined me" for fully healthy eating. And it sounds like that would be the end of the fairy tale, and fat would magically fall off her at lightspeed and all would be right with the world.

But that doesn't take into account slow metabolism. It doesn't take into account human nature. It doesn't take into account two people who have radically different tastes in foods. One of which has a palate shaped by almost nothing but carbfoods, and zero courage for or interest in trying new things. It doesn't take into account a kid who "can" cook but mysteriously insisted that mom be the one doing it.

It doesn't take into account a single working mom who doesn't always eat perfectly and has no energy during those periods, which affects categories 1-6 happening. It doesn't take into account every craving and frustration that two people with a different take on the same problem, different appetites, different food preferences, etc. can run into, rebound off and end up eating badly because it's so much easier, if I'm both busy and exhausted.

.*.*.

We are doing pretty decently now. She will be 14 in four months. She has lost many inches, more on her top half than bottom half, which is in accordance with our bottom-heavy fat storage.

She is over two inches taller than when we began and 'got serious'. I am nearly 5'6 and she is edging me out and her fingers are over half an inch longer than mine!

Everything seems like it's 10x harder when trying to do it for two people, one of whom is old enough to be autonomous, only likes the most fattening or carby foods, eats in the night no matter what I try to stuff her with in the day, and has radically different tastes so most the things I really like, I can't have, unless I have the energy to not only cook but cook two completely different meals, which is out of the question.

We're working on it though.

PJ's Crazy Theories

2010-04-07T01:40:00.009-05:00

I was talking to a lowcarb journal buddy and nearly posted this tome in her journal, and then thought it should be in mine instead, and then thought that I should post it on the blog, where a larger collection of people could kick it and tell me what's wrong with it so I can improve it.

This is a theory. Not a theory like in science. A wild-ass-intuition-imagination from a layman who just had an idea that found justification for its own existence (funny how beautifully facts do that for all of us no matter what we think :-)). I will call it PJ's Crazy Theory since you probably will too.

***

Food intolerances can cause all kinds of things -- psychological, as well as physical, and then more psychological in reaction to the physical, and then your outer world reacts to your physical and psychological reactions, and it becomes a whole snowball perpetuating itself. All because your body didn't like some molecule in your bagel. Go figure.

I am coming to suspect that severe obesity is probably almost inextricably entwined with food intolerances. It may be that, just like poor eating which affects people differently depending on genetics, maybe it is really the same as issues some others have, differently handled.

When you think about it, society as a whole would show what amounts to a "spectrum" based on how severely or multi/complex-ly all the people in that society reacted to the common foods. Ranging from people seeming totally ok, through the spectrum to people with rashes, or the horror of cystic acne, to so-called eating disorders, psychological issues, and at the far side of the spectrum, people developing various serious disease. It would actually make sense that the spectrum of people with any given 'condition' are probably on the far side of the spectrum for something else; the condition itself is secondary.

Imagine this model in your head where at point A is bad food, and point B is the body and genetics and history and so on, and then point C actually splits into many different paths, one being cancer, one schizophrenia, one diabetes, one obesity, etc. etc. That is how I have thought of obesity until now, mostly after reading Taubes. Basically, like obesity was a disease like cancer, so was schizophrenia. I've sort of changed my mind. I don't think of it like this anymore. Not quite, anyway.

I know this theory is nuts. There is no science to back this. It's just some fat woman in the midwest rambling. But WHAT IF...

Point A is toxic food intake.
Point B is the human body (genetics), its history (environment, plus cumulative stuff).
Point C is the immune system.
Point D has 3 segments and it is "reactions of the neuro-immune system."

(I say neuro because I read a bunch about neuro techs as I'm into brainwave feedback and such, and I am always sort of struck by how it seems to me that in some way the brain is actually having a fight/freeze/flight response. There is no science that I know of that would put it that way. So I guess tonight is just a wild rambling journey through my deviant mind, sorry.)

So I'm saying that I think how the brain reacts determines how the immune system reacts. But maybe that is a no-brainer (no pun intended) anyway -- maybe the brain controls everything. Who knows. Let's move on.

So we have the immune system which breaks into three branches of point D:

Fight, flight or freeze.

* the 'fight' point splits off into all these body-attacking syndromes like chronic fatigue, rheumatoid arthritis, celiac, things that seem to attack the body in some way.

* the 'freeze' point (like in/under-active) splits off into all these immune breakdown (or disease overcomes immunity) areas like cancer or susceptibility to viral disease for example.

* the 'flight' point splits off into like, rashes which is 'venting' through the skin, and obesity which is venting into fat cells, 'partitioning' the toxins 'away' from the body.*

(* This may be the body's way of 'running away' so to speak. Much like plants don't have claws and teeth so antinutrients are what they 'do', maybe the body's 'running away' manifests as 'closing things off from it/sending them away' one way or another.)

Now, seeing a 'spectrum' of response in the population would seem reasonable -- the degree of genetic response, the degree of environmental issues, the degree of cumulative problems, and the degree of "immune system reaction" perhaps, resulting in a rainbow of 'degree' which would be measured by condition, severity of condition, and timing of condition's full bloom.

* People at the 'far side of the spectrum' for fight-response may end up with severe RA when they're 7 years old, or CF when they're 17, whereas people farther back on the spectrum may just gradually get more and more symptoms until by the time they're 40 they're starting to have some bad arthritis.

* People at the far side of spectrum for immune 'freeze' response may get disease when very young -- *so young they may literally be born type I diabetic or get it in super-early childhood* -- or they might start finally getting schizo symptoms when they're about 20, stretching out down the milder spectrum all the way to people who seem perfectly fine until they are 86 years old and suddenly get Alzheimers/dementia. At the farthest part of that mild spectrum, people may die prior to manifesting disease--even if they would have, had they lived longer--so it 'seemed' like they were always healthy, despite eating the same foods, but really their place on the spectrum simply put their manifestation-point after their lifespan.

* People at the far side of the spectrum for immune "flight" response may not just get rashes as skin venting, as one pathway, but more serious syndrome stuff like cystic acne, or even -- by sheer coincidence yesterday I found this wiki page talking about a rare condition that sounds exactly like cystic acne except that the cysts are literally the size of softballs and anywhere in the body, no cure, no idea to cause, severe problems with them rupturing, etc. (Horrible!). Or if the body uses the fat-storage approach to venting/running/closing-off, the far-spectrum of people would not seem to stop getting fat (such as the body 'shifting' from the 'flight' response to the 'freeze' response and then adding disease), instead, they would just get huger until they were lumbering and eventually so huge they were immobilized. (Irony: you could almost think of it, eventually, as if *an entire human had been stored in a giant adipose cell and had become immobilized and inert*.) Even in some cases weighing 900# and yet they're NOT quite diabetic, or cancerous, or officially celiac -- just the far extreme of immune-flight via the adiposity-storage route.

I know this is a crazy theory, I have zero medical or science backing for it, and it probably just sounds like I came up with something to explain away my being crazy fat or something. But this is my theory for the moment: that maybe all conditions are actually a manifestation of "one of three types of neural/immune system" response to injury (rare) or poisoning (environmental or chronic food).

OK Taubes already suggested that nearly everything was a response to toxic food. I'm just saying sure, but what if the literal responses we can measure in the body, are actually responses to/from/via the *immune system* -- that this is actually the controlling point for literally everything.

***

OK let's get back to obesity and food intolerance. Just as an experiential comment, I think some of the compounding factors is that for many people and at least some foods, the "reaction" to a food which is essentially dangerous and damaging to their body, is like the reaction to some allergies: literally, craving.

As if this isn't bad enough, the type of foods that seem to most often cause this craving, may also result in literal addiction, by mucking about with neurochemistry and other body chemicals in various ways both direct (e.g. non-habituating neural stimulation) and indirect (e.g. positive association with feeling good from food X).

A nightmare cycle. The molecular-level damage is not obvious enough to 'see'. You see only the side effects that come from the toxins and the immune reaction to that. In the case of the immune-flight response via adipose-storage, so food doesn't give you hardly any of its energy for use (either because it's stored as a toxin or because it's suppressed due to its nature causing insulin highs), every iota of damage just results in more sense of need to eat more of the thing that's hurting you.

My buddy Sara was half-saying and implying *I think* the following, which I've fleshed out into my own words and added to: The psychology might develop all kinds of neurosis that are actually just the subconscious acting-out the model of the food being toxic. What if you got a flight fat-storage response combined with the subconscious reaction to the food as a toxin, would the anorexia (lack of appetite), combine with an obsession to NOT have bodyfat because the fat *itself* is slightly-toxic and the storage point/recognition of much of the 'thing' that is hurting the body? So Anorexia Nervosa might result (much like 'schizophrenia' does, an alleged psyche issue that is definitely physiologically based). Could the combination of craving-reaction to toxic-food, and the psychology reacting to the toxin like the previous, create the binge/purge bulemia cycle? Yes, of course we assign these to emotional issues, but as a hypnotist for many years I can tell you that you can have a person do anything on a posthypnotic command and they will rationalize why they did it when you ask them no matter how irrational they have to get to do it. So in my opinion, it's not that psychology causes certain behaviors but that physiology does and then the psychology 'grafts on' a rationalized explanation of 'why'.

I spent my entire life, literally, living almost entirely on gluten products and milk. And it looks like I have some pretty serious issues with gluten (at this point any of it gives me "severe asthma" -- which I never developed until age 35 and was medicated for until Lowcarb got me off gluten 'by accident' and made me realize gradually what was going on). And given the heroin-like more-more-more addictive response I had to milk for many years, probably that too. Eventually I refused to bring it into my house at all most the time, because the more I drank, the more I wanted, and this literally increased until I was waking up after every 3 hours sleep, in the kitchen at 3am, rushing for the milk, drinking from the carton, falling gasping in oh-thank-god-yes back against the fridge door as I got a fix. Serious junkies act like that. (I've known some... my brother died of a heroin overdose... milk is definitely my heroin.)

Now, it's hard to imagine how eating the very things you are intolerant to, most of 3 meals a day 7 days a week 12 months a year every year of life, first because they are *the primary cultural foods* and cheap and fast and common and yummy-tasting, and second because from very young you craved 'em -- how could all this NOT have some mind-bending effects. You'd think a person in that condition would be lucky to be alive at all frankly. Weighing over 500# at one point from, we assume, the combination of chronic over-intake and chronic over-storage and chronic refusal-to-release-from-storage (due to insulin) doesn't even seem all that surprising!

More theory... though it runs into and tackles some (hypotheses?) in Taubes's book I guess.

If your immune system reacts powerfully in a 'partitioning' (the "flight" reaction), say it takes all those free radicals and whatever and stuffs them into fat cells like crazy to make you safe, much the way we store toxic waste in containers in the ground. The more you ingest of the problem (toxic foods), the more stuff there is to store, even when you barely eat at all, let alone if you eat a lot, which you have to do more and more.

If you mostly eat Taco Bell as a humor example, the % and quantity of food you have to intake in order to get something that is (a) NOT toxic and not mixed in, in your stomach, with what's toxic, and (b) has protein-amino acids, which is mostly what your body wants, becomes utterly staggering, and I mean many thousands of calories a day kind of staggering. But nearly all of it's going to storage.

So the person has no none nada ZERO energy to move, for obvious reasons (their energy is locked in fat cells, not in the blood stream making them feel energetic) and this only hugely amplifies their desperation for carbs, which are "pure energy". <-- this last part, Taubes basically explained, and the foregoing that relates is sort of implied. Anyway back to my rambling theories:

But it turns out that the very toxic foods they crave (for reaction-reasons), and are addicted to (for intrinsic quality of the so-called food reasons, and indirect reasons of association) are the energy/carbs. So they are driven to eat more of those very things by their body's utter energy-less-ness. Plus, driven to eat more of them by the addictive-reaction. Which only makes for more toxins to store at all speed, and the person growing fatter, but each (maybe most) eating cycle(s) only makes for another round of almost no energy, so one is driven to find energy, and this cycle just keeps happening over and over.

***

Total trivia aside: for the last 20 years of my being huge, and the larger I got, one sort of odd thing is real noticeable: my BRAIN has energy (although it's "fogged" a bit with gluten present) when the rest of my body doesn't. I can sit as still as someone in a coma for 12 hours, until the need to pee makes me move (everything 'cracks' when I do!), it is almost surreal how little energy I can expend physically unless I am eating gluten-free low-carb and ENOUGH (80g++) protein. I barely BREATHE; my oxygen is incredibly low during those times; I don't just have sleep apnea, it's more like apnea, period -- I started getting that way as a young teen, my boyfriend used to comment when I was 16 on how my breathing got so shallow I eventually just wasn't breathing at all for awhile. I attributed it years later to emotional issues (not wanting to 'feel') but maybe it was instead -- or related to that -- the beginning of my version of metabolic syndrome and energy access slowing down/reducing. Anyway, but even when my body has absolutely no energy, my brain has always been extremely active. I don't know how to explain this so let's just leave it at that.

This leads however to a second thought: if my brain is used to taking nearly all the available energy--so it survives, while the body atrophies in some respects (low oxygen has SO many horrible effects on every cell of the body...) because it hasn't enough energy left over.

I am highly 'functional' so am not, haven't been, and likely never will be, classified as anything like bi-polar. However, I have what I call 'upcycles' and 'downcycles'. They are semi-cyclical but not totally predictable. I do not have 'un-functional' behaviors like people who tend to get medicated for this. In my downcycles I really just feel like reading or listening to music or sleeping (escape and low-energy) and I tend to sort of "trance out".

In my upcycles I am totally wired, I sleep maybe 3 hours a night and sometimes just skip sleep the first day, I invent stuff and create stuff and feel incredibly positive and optimistic and THINK so fast that ordinary conversation drives me nuts because people are so SLOW. However, in both cases, I'm behaving "within the spectrum of assumed normality" (my upcycles less so, probably) so mostly, in my life, the result is that what I don't get done during the downcycle, gets taken care of plus more in the upcycle, and in the end people just think I'm creative and accomplish a lot. They only see the "averaged end result" not the very variable-energy process.

I'm getting to the point I swear. This just seems like a niggling thing to pay attention to, it's bugging me like I should notice it. I have (without lots of protein and lowcarb) almost no energy, and I mean that in a rather profound, barely-breathing, coma-stillness kind of way that you'd probably need to be my size to grok. But my brain has energy (most of the time at least...) even then. But there are cycles when my brain -- *not my body so much, just my brain, with a little bit of spillover to my body like in insomnia* -- seems hyper-energetic, versus hypo-energetic.

What if over the course of time, due to this toxic then immune then energy-partitioned-in-favor-of-brain model, maybe eventually the brain starts taking nearly all the available energy. Unlike the "normal" scenario of healthy life, it's not that there is a bunch of energy and it feeds the whole body varyingly as needed. Instead, there's a tiny bit of energy, and the brain has first dibs on 92% of it, the max quantity it can grab for whatever reason (maybe this varies).

Now say that due to a shift in eating or stomach microbes or whatever, you don't even notice you end up for a day or two lower in insulin and higher in protein or fats, or lower in calories (energy), or maybe this has a 1-3 day average or lag time. And so all the sudden, the brain is deprived of some of its needed, used-to-having quantity of energy. In a healthy person, there would be enough energy, and if there wasn't, the brain would just take from the body portion, no problem. But in this case there isn't enough body portion of energy for the brain to add to its own % and come up with 'enough'. So maybe at that point the brain is having an energy crash and you get people in my case trancing out, doing anything to "not have to think much" -- and in some people's more extreme cases, you get people so depressed they can only lay in the dark, or cry.

Conversely, say that due to a shift in eating you don't even notice, stomach microbes, whatever, you end up for a day or two much HIGHER in resultant-energy. Maybe due to the 'habit' or established reaction caused by the ongoing energy problems, the brain takes its normal 92% of that far greater pool (or the body "only takes 8%") -- even though that is actually *too much* stimulus-energy for the brain. So you get people having euphoria, insomnia, inspiration, really high creativity and intellectual work, operating far too fast, so they come off as "manic" etc.

That is a totally separate line of wild speculation. I'm done with that now...

Possibly, without any shift in immune response, it could sometimes just be that a response is flight-via-fat-storage, but the repeated, massive overdosing of insulin and free radicals and more, actually has damaged the organs severely enough that eventually the immune 'defense' system can't compete and disease happens.

Or (more theory) the immune response might shift. Maybe the body instead of stuffing yet more crap into adipose cells, simply reaches a point where it is no longer able to handle the "flight" reaction, because the growth of fat% has put the body so far out of the genetic map of how that creature (person) should grow and not-grow or what size they should or even 'can' be, that the body has to do something else. At which point 'flight' no longer works, like a breaker switch flips, and the immune system has to shift to 'freeze' and they get disease, or 'fight' and they get the kind of illness that is not so much a disease like cancer as a disease like a syndrome, like RA and CF and IBS etc.

But the 'flight' response might often come first for some genetic lines, and have varying degrees of potential before the genetic 'body map' kicks the breaker for the creature growing too large -- which might explain why obesity is so 'correlated' with disease. It is not ONLY that the same thing is at the first point of all of them (toxic food); but it's that obesity as an immune response may have a spectrum of genetically-set limit on it, so it wouldn't at all be uncommon to see that at varying levels -- from 30# to 500# of overweight -- a shift happens and the person ends up with disease or disorder (one of the other immune reactions instead of flight). (This part I did not think up; it is "implied" by the existing idea that fat might be "protective" in some way.)

So sure, it would totally be "more common" that if you were obese, you were "more likely" to get a disease, since the chance that you are in that tiny segment of the "far side of the spectrum population" -- whose genetic maps don't seem to have the limit on size/storage and so they can grow to 800# or something -- are very slim compared to the chance that at some point, if you don't stop the stuff that is hurting you (and hence making you fat(ter)), it's going to shift into something more socially acceptable but probably more terminal.

So in this theory/model/framework, maybe the real problem is that we are trying to classify symptoms as 1001 different things and figure out what causes each of them. Meanwhile on the other side there are some scientists/doctors who seem to suspect already that the same thing causes all of them (chronic food toxicity). But maybe the confusingly missing part in the middle is that every condition, disease and disorder, from skin rashes to chronic fatigue to cancer to anorexia nervosa to obesity, ALL of them are actually just one of the three "immune system reactions", acting at various points on the spectrum, acting in a path perhaps determined by genetics.

I know, this was boring, but I had to get it on paper. Then I can look back at this and laugh hahaha what was I thinking someday. But if I don't write it down, even when this thunderstorm ends I still might not be able to sleep. I feel better now. Thanks for suffering with me. :-)

PJ

Teenage Low-Carb

2010-04-06T06:57:00.000-05:00

I'm going to be posting, over the next week, a several-post series summarizing what I have learned, experienced, still struggle with, and have accomplished, in regards to my 13 year old daughter and our whole-foods, gluten-free, low-carb lifestyle.

Basically, a sort of bullet point and narrative summary of our ongoing attempt to improve nutrition, feel better, and reduce body fat, but specific to the issues that relate to her.

If there are any specific questions feel welcome to post 'em in the comments section and I'll include that topic in the posts.

More soon!
PJ

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VLC, Hyper-Nutrient, and Mysteries

2010-03-20T15:36:00.008-05:00

Well my first thought is, "I haven't posted on this blog in nearly six months!" Holy cats! How time flies! I didn't realize. I've lived and worked 'on the internet' for 15 years and I swear it has really mucked about with my 'time-sense'.

I've been working nearly like an ancient egyptian slave for a long time, so my time for anything else has been super limited. Also though, I have gone off and on "serious" LC -- and had not yet fully implemented my 'hypernutrient' approach which I wanted to have some follow up to next time I posted on this blog.

Today is day 5 on a return to more officially-sane eating. (Usually, my eating is LC by default. It's just that in some periods, there is other HC stuff too. When I go official, anything HC is totally out.) This is the first time I've gotten to my "Hyper-nutrient" approach.

It's like ten handfuls of big pills. I do ok swallowing pills but this really pushes my limits! That is every other day. On the alternate days I take only a few of the supplements: a liquid multi (NOW brand), and dropper-bottle under-tongue doses of B-12 (NOW), and two different blue-green algaes (Klamath). I try to "think to" my body, "OK, I'm sending you a ton of elements. Pick what you want out of all these, flush the rest." I actually thought that taking this much stuff at once (always just after eating) would result in digestive surprise of some sort, but it doesn't.

I feel more clear-headed and energetic than I have in a LONG time. I noticed it pointedly on day 2.5, and more each day since. Last night I did more stuff around the house than I have in eons, re-read a book on weight lifting, just felt a lot more proactive. Today I did a lot more house stuff, including some hard muscle scrubbing of the stove and various parts of the kitchen, we did prep cooking and then made a quiche, I did a slow lift of really light (5#) weights, sitting on the incline bench, nearly every arm/shoulder push/pull exercise I could remember, just to remind my body what it was like. If my energy keeps increasing like this, I'll be working out for real again by mid next week.

This is an anomaly, though. There's something mysterious going on. To recap:

About 3 years ago, VLC (that means >30 carbs a day), which I love eating and had lost a whole lot of weight on, suddenly quit working for me. I mean I seriously felt like crap eating that way, which I couldn't understand as it hadn't been that way before. The "feeling bad" was different than my ordinary "lack of energy." Normally, if I'm not eating 85+g protein daily, I have little energy. (Any decent amount of grains/fructose/lactose make it worse.)

I don't think people realize just how sedentary someone my size can be. I don't just mean "I don't do the dishes or exercise," I mean literally you'd probably need to be in a coma to be any more "still" -- not using any more energy than sleep probably -- than I can be for really long periods of time, comfortably. It's part of the same health issue that causes the food to store its energy as fat and not give it back to you as energy. But that is not like the 'exhaustion' of an illness, and it is not like being sleepy. I have a LOT of "mental energy" -- more than most people I suspect -- just none for the rest of the body (I think maybe my brain grabs everything available!).

But the feeling bad on VLC was more like, feeling seemingly like normal people, plenty of energy, and then at some point in the day -- alas sometimes morning -- it was like I would "hit a wall" and suddenly understand perfectly that "my battery was on zero%" and that's it. I mean there were times I was doing something -- lifting weights, doing dishes, whatever -- and I literally stopped in the middle of a motion, dropped what I was doing and walked away and sat or laid down. The "sudden" zero-energy was like being hit with something, I'd never experienced anything like that before. And after a few days, it seemed to translate into an overall feeling utterly crappy that I just couldn't stand. So I would eat some carbs -- and feel better.

But every time I would up carbs, it had the same effect that my attempts at carb cycling had: it sent me completely offplan. I simply quit caring about lowcarb almost immediately. So I tried to break it down into a specific food. Just berries. Just beans. Just a little bread. Whatever. And one by one, determined that there wasn't ANY food that would raise my carbs to 50-60 daily (that i liked) without seeming to just change my whole chemistry, food preference, etc.

After 3 years of this, and spending more time off LC than on as a result, I have theory#1, that it is not necessarily a given food triggering me; it's just having over a certain (unspecific) number of carbs for more than one day in a row is all.

But now for the Annoyingly Contradictory Facts, there are two carb-foods that I can eat without it throwing me off-plan. Beans, which we ate in stews, and corn tortillas, which we fry in OrgNonHyd Palm shortening. The problem with the beans is it is so easy to overcarb, in fact we almost can't help it just by decent serving size, and it makes any weight loss whatever come to a stop. The problem with the corn tortillas (check for gluten in the ingredients, they vary) is that they're like 10 carbs each, so I tend to get too many carbs and not enough protein when I eat them. I still do on occasion but we are working on limiting that.

We had to put a moratorium on peanut butter in the house. Both of us, if we touch the stuff, become obsessed with it and it seems to be a very 'small' almost-trigger of carb-desire. I was never that crazy about peanut butter until I went low carb, go figure.

As usual, I have the predictable effect of getting my protein up to 85+g/day (preferably about 100-120g/day) for several days running. First I have tons of "fidget energy". Then I want to get up and cook more and get up and make coffee more and little things like that. Then I start cleaning more (I have a housekeeper so don't normally), little obvious things like the dishes. Then all the sudden, it's like my environment springs into view. I walk into the kitchen and think, good grief that spice shelf, those cupboards, the fridge, that must get cleaning! I walk into the living room and think the same thing about the big built-in bookcase and the carpet and everything else. I told some friends that the last time I was decent on protein for an extended period, I ended up like some unholy union of Tim Allen and Martha Stewart, with house and yard and garden projects all over the place. There is something amusing about the fact that when I finally get enough protein for awhile, that instantly becomes my focus. I'm a rather practical and proactive sort by nature, it's just that usually I haven't the energy to do anything about it whatever, unless it's something I can do sitting motionless at the computer. Crank up the protein, which I have a simply horrible time keeping decently high most days even after years, and everything changes.

OK so now for the anomaly. This issue with "feeling like crap if I eat VLC" has gone on for three years. Three years! That's a long and consistent time.

But 5 days ago we went VLC because I wanted my (13 year old) daughter to do this for awhile. She has been consistently losing weight on the "mostly except occasionally" low-carb that we've been eating for quite some time, but verrrrrry slowly. I wanted to bring it back to only-basics and see if we could do something better for her speed of weight loss. Or to correct that, size-loss: she hasn't lost a single pound on the scale although she has lost at least two shirt sizes and her pants fit very differently. I had intended to add in some other foods for me, to up my own carbs; I bought avocados partly for that purpose that I'm ripening. But then I ended up working very long hours and just not getting around to it.

And then I realized that by now I should feel hideous but actually, I feel really good. After 3 years, suddenly I can eat VLC again and it works for me? Really?! What the heck!

Could it be all the supplementation? That is the one thing that has changed. I don't have any easy way to parse out what element of supplementation might be responsible, unless it's just a synergy of some kind.

I've had a lot of people tell me they were the same way. They ate VLC, felt great, lost weight, then at some point just could not do VLC at all without feeling like crap. But if they increased their carbs they felt ok again. Maybe not good but ok. Mostly women have told me that. So I know that wasn't just me, I wasn't just spontaneously imagining it, and heck, not for 3 years!

And yet spontaneously after 3 years it suddenly doesn't work that way anymore. Suddenly VLC feels just fabulous again, I'm losing the initial water weight at decent speed, I am vastly more energetic and optimistic than I am off low-carb of course, like everything is back to the way it used to be. I'm utterly baffled.

Could it just be time? Like the body needs some period of recovery after losing a lot of weight really fast? And in my case that's a *really* long time? I've eaten back and forth from LC to HC for the last 3 years. (As a result my weight has gone from 356-405 about 8 times in that period. I don't really take it that seriously, since 20+ of that is water weight anyway.)

Or is it the nutrient supplementation?

Or -- this is hilarious -- could it be that the huge quantity of supplements, all added together, plus the liquids, simply kick my carb intake every other day up 20-40 carbs? So in a way I'm getting more carbs but I'm not having to a eat a likely-triggering food for it?

It's a mystery. I don't know, but I'm happy about it!

PJ

PāNu + HyperNutrient

2009-10-04T23:36:00.005-05:00

I wrote in my last blog post about my Hyper-Nutrient plan. That is going fine.

Here's a few trivias so far.

Vitamin C is not actually a vitamin you need a little of, but a liver enzyme you need a lot of. Somewhere between 'conspiracy' and 'ignorance' is the Vitamin C subject in our world, much like the carbohydrate issue. Google it, and Linus Pauling, and read everything in sight for about 10 nights and a couple weekends, and you will be on the same page with me about it. Summary: I am taking as much of it orally as I can without flushing effects.

How much you can take before the 'excess' starts flushing (the runs, to put it plainly) depends apparently on how much there is inside your body for it to take care of. (And it takes care of a LOT of stuff. This is one amazing enzyme.) So far I'm able to take about 16g per day, 3-4g every few hours, without side effects. This implies that there's a lot of work to be done inside I guess. I would attempt actual treatment with larger IV doses, but all the docs I see who do that are in California for the most part.

Vitamin D is a hormonal precursor, which as it turns out you also need a lot of (especially if you're very fat), unless you are living naked in Argentina. I take around 5-10,000iu per day, but have taken up to about 50,000 without any noticeable side effects. When I first began taking it (around 5,000iu) I had a marked increase in my "sense of well-being". Haven't really noticed anything specific since then one way or the other.

I've also been taking double-doses of calcium, magnesium, potassium, the spectrum of B vitamins, Vitamin E, and vitamin K2. And a multi which has Vitamin A (that has a toxic dose that isn't real high so I avoid much supplementing with that one). Oh yea, and co-enzyme CQ10.

More on results further below. Tomorrow starts week three of my eating plan experiment and this is the week that I add in all the "other" supplements. I am already pretty tired of taking pills and this is a zillion more. Oy!

PāNu

Just before/during the first week of this current eating plan experiment I happened upon the PāNu blog. (I cannot figure out how to make that "ā" with HTML so have had to just 'copy' it from his site. I hope your browser can see it.) This is the website of Dr. Kurt G. Harris M.D. who, after reading Gary Taubes's seminal book Good Calories, Bad Calories ('The Diet Delusion' in the UK), decided to go public with a blog partly in support of the cause.

The detail of Dr. Harris's plan is here: http://www.paleonu.com/get-started/

In a nutshell, it's lowcarb, with no grains/legumes/sugars, no veggie/seed oils, fairly high-fat, with some degree of Intermittant Fasting, and Vitamin D3 supplementation. Three points on his plan that I am not abiding by currently are 9, 10 and 12, which are grass-fed meats, exercise, and removal of the last shred of dairy (cheese). All the others I am not on track with.

Now, nearly everything on that list I have done at one time or another over the last 2.5 years (of not losing any real weight I might add). But I haven't necessarily done them together. So that part, that is a change for me.

I have added this eating plan to my "Hyper-Nutrient" plan currently going on and am doing them together.

Since reverting back to low carb, I lost from the water-gain (404) down to what I believe is my 'real' weight (384). Anything beyond that I consider actual body mass of some kind lost, not fluid.

My eating plan, aside from hypernutrient, had an expected problem: eating very low carb (<30 carbs/day), each time I've tried this for the last 2.5 years, I feel like crap. Just really BAD. More to the point, I cannot sustain it. I go off into carbs almost immediately, even lowcarb versions (e.g. peanut butter), anything. So over the last 2.5 years I've tried a little bit of everything. Add in some dairy. Add in some fruit. Add in some legumes. Everything I have tried to increase my carbs has led to me going off the wagon. Or, in the case of legumes, I could stay on that one just fine, but I didn't lose a single pound of weight.

I know myself by now. In the first case there's something actually wrong and I'm miserable and my body's reacting to fix it. In the second case I'm being triggered. Nothing has actually worked very well for me and it's been a long time. Maybe VLC would still work for weight loss but that's a little like the low-fat/low-cal approach: if you cannot sustainably live on that, for whatever reason it might be (in my case, a mystery, maybe hormonal), then it doesn't matter.

So I never really did get a clear plan of what I was going to eat except 'low carb' without stress on the low part, high fat with some stress on that just for vitamin absorption, and hope like hell I can find some way back and forth to avoid ending up under the wagon. When I found Harris' PāNu I decided to make that my official eating plan, to the degree I could, along with the Hyper-Nutrient supplementation, and this includes eating twice a day (~3pm & 9pm).

In week 1, I lost 3.5 pounds.
In week 2, I lost 3.5 pounds.

Kinda odd it's the exact same amount each week. And unlike my normal lose/gain-a-ton / or almost nothing, which is mostly fluid. I have reason to believe this is actual fat loss.

Weirder still, I feel ok. Not energetic, but not tired. Just 'ok'.

It has been a really long time since I specifically had weight that I felt was fat loss. Now maybe seven pounds is not damn much to be celebrating about at my weight, but it is the first genuine fat loss I have seen happening off my body in a really long time!

So much of my existing plan was so similar to this already that it's hard to see what has changed, aside from doing all the points "at once" rather than irregularly depending on what I was trying, and adding the supplements of course, and mild IF. I don't know if I can credit some weight loss to a ton of sudden Vitamin C helping with something, to some jungian body exercises I've done, to the shift to some degree of intentional IF, or to PāNu having caused me to combine my habits in a certain way.

Regarding IF, I have taken the last week to eating these coconut bites that are 1 Tbsp coconut oil each, eating just one bite with a vitamin dose, then another a few hours later, etc. so when I am not eating food I am actually getting a tiny number of calories in. Probably same/less as anyone who drinks coffee with cream. My goal is to keep my metabolism from falling into 'off' mode which it seems to do abnormally well, while still keeping macronutrients low. Since my weight gain has come from eating once a day and most my weight loss from eating many times a day, I'm looking for a compromise there to see if this works. So far, at least, it is.

I will update this with progress.

But given how I have kvetched about feeling betrayed and confused and lost and demoralized, I thought I should be blogging about actually trying something that seems to be working for me. Here's hoping it keeps coming together!

PJ
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Hyper-Nutrient

2009-09-24T01:27:00.007-05:00

I have a theory that maybe the cells of my body are malnutritioned. It's not my original theory, and it's no more than a theory. But to me, intuitively, it makes some sense.

I have thought a lot a lot about Regina's Good Sense, as I call it. Her functional, beautiful dietary advice that included a range of healthy foods ought to be enshrined somewhere. Of course, being reasonable, it's impossible for me to follow, not the least of which is I don't like vegetables and eating the same thing constantly is the only thing that makes lowcarb possible for me at all and it's still a pain in the butt.

The point about getting nutrients seems important. But think about this for a minute. In today's world, with the limited food variety most people eat, with the dumbed-down nutrient version of produce we have now, and that goes for most meats as well (which often have toxic additives--my walmart chicken is 15% injection, sheesh!)--we [as humans] are not eating hearts and feet much anymore you notice--it seems incredibly unlikely that ANY person can truly get all the nutrition they need from food.

(And I don't believe the RDA is anything more than minimums. If I waited for the government to have a clue even about getting-old science, like on Vitamin D3, I'd just expire. I think some things do have toxic levels, like Vitamin A and potassium; most overdose levels like on Magnesium will just torque your elimination experience. But I suspect most things on the official list we need way more of than anybody currently believes.)

So even for average sized people, it seems very unlikely that they can even 'maintain' truly adequate nutrition -- especially when you add in the constant environmental toxins/stresses, and assume they're not eating a zillion calories in nothing but pure-foods -- solely on food.

So that food could possibly, in addition to maintaining, also "make up for" a very long period of extended cellular-level malnutrition seems rather unlikely.

And that it could do all that for a body supersized AND long-term nutritionally-deficient seems impossible to me.

In response to this idea-set, I am doing a brief period of what I call "hyper-nutrient". This is not about eating nearly everything in sight in the hopes of nutrifying (I think I just made that word up) the body. I don't think it's possible for a body my size to get enough food to truly nutrify and "remediate existing deficits" as well as current needs, without causing, long before that point, other horrible problems like more-fat, blood sugar issues, etc. just from quantity of food intake.

Over the last few months I have been buying, with all my spare cents, a ton of supplements. All of these are things that I have read about somewhere, and decided to try. Some are no-brainers with lots of science. Some are a few people on blogs raving about some obscure extract. Some are amino acids and some are 'alternative' at best. My idea is that I want to 'flood my system with opportunity', consistently, for a little while. Hopefully 90 days. I will be running out of most things long before that so some depends on money to buy more.

I have a second theory that my body will grab what it wants as it's passing through. That if my fat intake is high, there is ability for absorption if it is needed, and if my water intake is high, there is ability for flushing if it is unwanted. So a high and constant fat intake combined with a minimum of a gallon a water a day is a primary part of this effort. I am simply trusting that my body will do something useful with the opportunity. I don't have much choice but to do that.

Of course if this has any positive result, I will have no idea what might be having the effect (or if it's a synergy of 1 or more items). But I don't have 800 years to experiment with this. So I'm just dosing myself intensely, but briefly. These are vitamins; minerals; amino and fatty acids, herbs and extracts. They range from ordinary no-brainers like Vitamin D3, to some obscure Tibetan Mushroom. Heh. Let's just say that I figure the more the merrier, as long as I don't get any signs that it's hurting me. I expect that the sudden dosing of so many different things, plus the increase in my fat intake, will make my bathroom experience more interesting than usual, but I'm willing to put up with that for the cause.

Theories About the Hunger Reflex

Speaking of theories, I have another one. I think it is possible that my dissociative bare-connection with body hunger (where I ignore that I'm starving and undereat, or overeat when I'm not remotely hungry just because I like the food) is because at some point a big body of starving cells had some mutant effect on my hunger-reflex.

I might compare this to the ideas of Dr. Batmanjali (Your Body's Many Cries for Water) who theorized that chronic low-level dehydration gets to the cellular level and messes up the thirst-reflex, because we don't drink water but other, even mildly poisonous things which may worsen dehydration, instead, when that reflex acts up. Simple Extinction Paradigm in learning theory. Fortunately, biologically hardwired, so able to be revived merely by drinking a decent amount of water regularly for several days, after which your body starts wanting it, and specifically wanting water, too, which is pretty novel for most people who didn't even like it until then. He believes it takes drinking 'enough' water for about 3-4 months to 'rehydrate' fully. Note that in his world, things made with water usually don't count because as he describes and sketches, it changes the molecular structure of the water.

My theory is: Maybe cellular starvation messes up the hunger reflex -- making people overhungry, underhungry, or an erratic variant of both. Maybe that is part of what goes wrong with metabolisms that end up supersized.

I notice that the folks I know dealing with this issue are sometimes trying to figure out why the eating habits of big people are so bizarre. Some people are hungry all the time. Some people are seldom hungry. Some people eat totally without regard to hunger. It's a clear dissociation, or maybe 'random' association is a better way to put it. No matter what the individual detail, it certainly isn't "normal" so to speak.

Of course, this makes eating plans that say, "Only eat when you're hungry, and only until you're satisfied, and only what your body really wants," completely boneheaded for anybody with the hunger-dissociate effect going on, because those things mean absolutely nothing in that case. (And if you include grains/fructose in that eating plan it's doomed anyway for most folks, as those will trigger all kinds of stuff.)

Supersized Eating

Most onlookers, I realize, seem to think that people my size just eat constantly and hugely (I call that "the bon-bon theory" of obesity). It's just not true. For example, and this is not even unusual, Monday I didn't eat at all. Yes, I was hungry, but eating was inconvenient it so happened. Yesterday I ate three times and around 2100 calories (chuck burger, chuck burger, and eggs). Today I ate a ~9oz chuck burger patty and later a very small green apple. Tomorrow I hope to make the coconut-oil cocoa bites so that I can up both my calories and fat intake, using those little bites around whatever else I eat, in preparation for my "hyper-nutrient" phase where I need both fat and calories to be at a decent level. I have a hard time, when eating low carb, keeping my calories up, and little things of fat I can eat off and on help a lot.

Sure, it's true that right now my kitchen's being painted so cooking is a pain in the butt, and I might have had more like a few strips of bacon and some sauteed mushrooms if my kitchen were not in empty-chaos.

It's also true that if I eat carby food -- and that can be grains or fruit or legumes even at low-carb levels I might add -- my body seems "triggered" and historically, I find within a few days, 5 tops but usually less, I am completely off-plan and eating every carb in sight, and it takes me a few days to a few weeks to get my act together again. It is, as a friend once suggested to me, a lot like the problems newly recovering alcoholics have, when they keep letting circumstance or tiny quantities into their lives and end up under the wagon. So, had I been writing this about two weeks ago, I could say that I had eaten potato chips and a candy bar one day and pizza that night. (Felt like I was gonna die the next day just from the bloating!) Not from binging or upset, just from eating whatever sounded good. I am on lowcarb probably 85-90% of the time the last two years. The other 10-15%... you don't want to know.

So I'm not saying I eat impeccably all the time. What I've been working on the last couple years is how to eat more carbs (because VLC got to where I felt bad on it and had no energy, nor did I seem to be losing much weight any further), without those carbs triggering me offplan (and so far basically everything I have tried has, in fact, sent me face-down into the carbs offplan entirely). I have not yet resolved that problem. It honestly seems like if the only problem was ONE problem -- carbs/calories -- that would be so much easier than having food intolerances and other issues. I swear, if it isn't one thing . . . then again maybe the "combined complexity" of multiple problems is what determines who weighs 220 vs. who weighs 520, so I should just expect that whatever the answer for me personally is, it probably isn't simple.

So I do have to credit eating "mostly meat and no fructose/grains/legumes" for WHY I don't particularly have a problem with overeating most the time -- unless those things are brought into my diet of course.

Back to the point:

But despite all those caveats, you will note that despite the fact that I am lowcarb probably 85% of the time, I am not really any thinner than I was two years ago. Which at my weight, seemingly ought to happen as long as I am not ingesting a cow and a large pizza daily. Nor am I necessarily on a see-food diet during the times I'm offplan (like my worst-case example above), it just means I wasn't avoiding nearly every food in the world that wasn't "meat/eggs" is all. In theory... I ought to be thinner. But you know what theories count for when it comes to metabolism.

The Best Advice

Long ago a hypnosis/NLP group I was in had this slogan, "If what you're doing isn't working, do something else." I know this seems totally obvious. But it isn't what most humans do. If we do something and it doesn't work, we do it again. Several times. If it still doesn't work, we do it harder, pound a little and yell at it. It's kind of hilarious. Albert Einstein allegedly once said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. So far, I have been looking at what I've done dietarily the last few years, and haven't done or couldn't do, and looking at what people around me have done.

This 'Hyper-Nutrient' phase (and there are a couple other details alongside this I'll get to below) is "something else." I don't have any indication it's going to help anything and if it does, it probably won't even show up except subtly and gradually AFTER that phase. But my goal is to lose enough fat to fit in a single airplane seat, to ride a bike and carnival rides, to be able to do much more intense exercise than I can now. So, for my goals, what I have been doing is not working. So I am doing 'something else'. The details of how well it works, or works for me, or its details that can be varied -- that's another story. Who knows.

Hyper-Nutrient or HN as I call it -- because damn I love cute names and acronyms, and this field is full of them -- has a variety of details that are simply custom to me and my beliefs, eating habits and idealism. Here are the overall points I am attempting to maintain as part of this plan/cycle.

Hyper-Nutrient: Details

1. Hyper-nutrition: supplementation of just about everything I can get my hands on. Consideration of not overdosing on some things (like Vit A or Potassium). Consideration of 'format'; I may have a few different types of a given thing that I trade off, or take one of each. I may have things I take 2-3x a week, not every day. Supps include vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids, herbs, custom blends, obscure extracts, etc. There are some offbeat other forms of supplement too. For example, I have a number of essential oils and am making a point to occasionally have them in the air, or massaged into my skin. Part of the idea here is that everything is synergy and the body's absorption of one thing depends so much on others, and much of that is still to be learned by science frankly. So I feel the best way to get the most nutrition fast is just to supplement with everything across the board.

2. Food intake: based primarily on fat, with some protein, so the body can absorb the nutrients as well as possible. Sufficient calories (for me that's at least 2000), fairly high fat (70%++), dominantly via coconut oil on days when I'm not eating a lot of chuck burger (which takes care of itself fat-wise). This diet may be very low carb ketogenic, simply because I'm more focused on keeping my fat up than my carbs up at the moment, but as I am trying to bring in more carbs for my kid and I feel better with a little more, it is likely to vary. I track my details, so oh well, I'll see what works. I want sufficient protein -- 80-140 is my range, I'm aiming for the low side during this period since fat is the focus. This eating approach mirrors plenty of existing lowcarb eating plans out there; I don't consider the details a big deal here, whatever works for someone, me in this case, at a given time. Obviously, foods with high problem profiles (grains or dairy for some people, and always 'chemicals' that aren't real-food) are usually better left out of any eating plan as much as is practical.

3. Liquid intake: no caffeine (because it's a diuretic; I want my body to vent water and nutrients as it sees fit, not be sparked/forced to that, which will only leave my supplements in the toilet before my body had a chance to decide about holding onto some of that); at least a gallon of water a day (this because of my size, it'd be less if I were smaller). In a perfect world, diet drinks and their chems would not be in here anywhere. I'm likely to have a diet soda once in awhile though, to be realistic, but not often.

4. Detoxification: to ensure the body can rid itself not only of old toxins it might be inspired to during this period, but new things it doesn't want to keep that I'm ingesting like crazy, some basic detox things are going on during this as well. (a) See #3 on water intake. (b) I'm using body/foot pads for 'alleged' detox. Like some of the supplements I don't know how legit this is at all let alone for me, but I don't believe it hurts anything but my wallet to try. I intend to try them in my other main lymph-detox area, right between underarm and breast. (c) I'll be taking a tablespoon of bragg's apple cider vinegar with mother most mornings (also in the alternative-maybe's category). I'm not doing much else for detox because I don't want to be flushing my system with anything but water during this period.

5. Exercise: I have no rules about exercise right now, except that I'd like to do some when practical and I feel like it. I think it's always good, and important. From my armchair, I think that.

That's about it. It's my first-draft of an idea and although I began my 12 week period last Monday, I don't start the hypernutrient period until this coming Monday. So I'm sure actually "doing it" will probably bring up things I hadn't thought about.

Measuring effects won't be easy, as I mentioned. This is more a hope that several months down the road, fat loss will be more efficient for me, probably for no reason I can put my finger on, but maybe something about this will have helped. As long as I'm not overdosing on the few known dangerous limited nutrients, I don't see how it could hurt.

PJ
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Birthdays and Goals

2009-09-10T04:57:00.003-05:00

I turn 44 Monday, September 14th.

I've been working hard on 'parsing' immense amounts more stuff out of my house, and the rest much more condensed and organized. The result being vastly less clutter and more space. (Is it just me or is it nearly impossible not to associate house-clutter with bodyfat?)

We're painting a couple rooms this weekend, including my hideously dark blotchy bedroom. That is sure to change my environment drastically and cheerfully.

Here's hoping that as a result of all this effort, I feel more accomplished by Monday. :-) Because I haven't really accomplished anything on the weight front this year.

It occurs to me there are a lot of different ways to set goals. Not just daily but the larger stuff. What the scale says is one but surely there are many others.

So what do other people think? What do you make as your 'goals'? What is the criteria by which you judge if you've accomplished something useful in the previous year's time??

PJ
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August 09 Collected Trivia

2009-09-05T04:10:00.002-05:00

The little things: stuff in August that wasn't big enough deal for a whole blog post.

Observations * Quotes * Ideas * Recipes * Links * Other

Observations

1. Low-carb not only makes your butt smaller, it turns your hair blonde. The larger you begin and the smaller you get, the more noticeable this effect. For proof of this theory, you need only see the impressive before & after photos of women who lost a lot of weight and got down to their normal size. (Example: the lovely, smart and kind Valerie. But there are so many other examples, seriously!) Someone needs to do some research on why insulin affects hair melanin. (At least it's not as extreme the effect as one gets from "fame" in the entertainment industry, which can actually turn you almost-white, no matter what race you begin. ;-))

2. I finally sat down and worked out my weekly/monthly budget for food, as well as other sundries (from medicine to cleaning supplies to cat food to paper plates) that I buy at the grocery store. The number nearly made me just keel over like a cartoon. No wonder I have no money, I am spending a ridiculous amount on food. This has made me determined to better pre-plan everything as I think spontaneous and 'miscellaneous' spending as well as stuff I throw away for it getting out of date is worth changing.

Quotes

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye."

-- Miss Piggy

"The man who does not read a newspaper is uninformed. The man who does read the newspaper is misinformed."

-- Mark Twain

Ideas

1. I think my eating habits may be affected by hormonal cycles. Like much of the time eating decently is no problem aside from getting off my butt and doing it. But sometimes it's much harder and I've just noticed that it seems slightly cyclical. I've long known that chocolate cravings went with PMS, but maybe it's more than that?

2. Enzymes that help with digestion of fiber-carbs such as 'Beano' for example, actually increase the soluble fiber. That's basically creating more carbs INside the body. I'd never thought of that.

3. Turns out the thyroid is the first stop in the immune system, cleansing blood. How is it I didn't know this already?

4. I read several long pages detailing digestion from the point of the stomach to exit. While not an appetizing subject it's actually very interesting. It brought me to the idea that maybe the only evil more insidious than high-carbs and fructose is fiber. Who knew. Well, the people who make money on stuff that is both high-carb and fibrous, they probably knew.

Recipes

This month has been understated for food, at best. Mostly we've eaten chuck burger patties with something on top like cheese, or pesto, or LC ketchup. I've done a lot of sauteeing mushrooms, onions and garlic together (in bacon grease ideally) and dumping those on a burger patty. If my food life got any more predictable I could just chisel it in stone.

I did get a chorizo-spices recipe I'm making with ground turkey but so far it hasn't gone well; will work on it more and if it works out I'll post it later.

The only thing I've "made" that hasn't been whole foods is a coconut oil thing. It's just a way of downing extra fat/calories (and coconut oil as the source of them). I don't like it in coffee, can't eat it plain, so this is the only way I can do it. 1/2 cup very-melted coconut oil, 4 Tbsp quality dutched cocoa, a couple different sweeteners to taste. Put 1-2 Tbsp in some kind of silicon baking pan (eg mini muffin, mini donut, etc.), freeze briefly, pop out and put the pieces in a ziploc bag in the fridge. Easy to just pop one in your mouth if you need the calories/fats, or haven't time to eat, or have a sweet tooth. My kid says, "Gross, this tastes like nothing but oil and chocolate!" Yes. It is. That's why. I find it sweet and rich and handy though.

More actual recipes next month hopefully.

Links

1. Do you half-live online? Do you have 'real friends' online? Who would know if something happened to you? Wouldn't it be cool if you could arrange custom letters for online friends or forums in case that Sweet Chariot Is Swinging Low, Coming For To Call You Home or something? Try slightlymorbid.com - a friend of mine runs this and it's a neat service.

2. Do you spend too much time working or typing on your computer? Do you know that brief breaks -- 30 seconds to refocus your eyes to super-close and far-distance, to put your palms over them for darkness, to stretch your body around where you're sitting, to stop typing, all that stuff is really good for your health and increases your productivity? There's a nifty program that lets you set timing and actions to 'remind you' when you're typing along to take a brief break, or in larger/longer form to take a 10 minute break and go walk around briefly. Settings let you postpone it, skip it, etc., and it's free and easy. See workrave.com. I think this could be used for prayer/meditation reminders and more, in my perfect world.

Other

I've been doofing around for like 2.5 years now I guess. I don't stay on LC long enough to accomplish much and go off when I do. What worked for weight loss initially doesn't seem the same now but I haven't done well at carefully experimenting with what might.

So I came up with what I call a "day-plan". This means an eating plan that spans one single day, and I simply have to do that day a certain number of times (5, 7, 10) in a row and look at the scale, how I feel, etc. in order to decide whether that particular macronutrient quantity and % is working for me. If it's not, then I can make a change in something. But at least I'd be doing the same thing consistently so there should be no wondering about whether some food intolerance or variance in numbers or whatever is the reason for anything. Maximum 10 days, it either proves itself (in weight, in dimensions, in feel-good) or it doesn't then I move on.

My first day-plan began today. It's ~2300-odd calories, 40-50g (total) carbs, 115g protein and the rest fat (so, dominantly a high-fat ratio). I'm using some of the cocoa-coconut oil bits, pesto, and some cream in coffee, as my non-meat fat sources so if I don't lose any weight on this I can easily take out calories by removing that stuff gradually. It's a plan that only has cooking twice a day (and it's quick, ~7 minutes) and aside from one creamy coffee has NO DAIRY, the first time I have seriously tried to wean myself off cheese (as well as gluten). I drink water, iced tea, OR if I walk to the store I'm allowed one regular-sized bottle of diet soda per walking-visit. I'll let you know how it goes.

Homeschool has begun and I swear, this year it feels like a second job. Algebra, foreign language (Japanese, for godssakes -- she couldn't just like spanish or french, right?!), political science (we do joint oral reading and discussion for that), basic science, internet research, internet studies (eg html, etc.), reading, writing, art (graphic design software as well as sketching, calligraphy and more) etc. I'm exhausted just assigning assignments, never mind going through them, never mind getting on her to DO them!

The kid's doing ok on her eating plan. Kinda sick of her options though.

I turn 44 on September 14th. It's really a trip to see myself aging. As I get older birthdays become more reflective for me. I hope this one lets me feel like I am doing something decent with my life.

Hope y'all had a good month of August and that September goes well for you!

PJ

Teen-age Low-Carb: 90% Angst, 10% Protein

2009-08-09T15:25:00.006-05:00

My beautiful little drama queen turns 13 on the 13th of this month. We are both treating this birthday as A Really Big Deal™ for her 'coming of age'.

I'm spending way too much money on her. And we are going on our first-ever 'vacation' together, two weekend days in Joplin MO, a city an hour away that more closely approximates "civilization" than our own small city, where we're going to stay in a hotel, take long baths, use their jacuzzi, and eat at all the wonderful places we have not visited in over a YEAR now -- like Outback, Olive Garden, etc.

Yes, that means that basically the day we celebrate one full month fully back on VLC, is the day her birthday cake (another special request from her) arrives and we begin four days of intentional off-plan eating. My mind already has lectures pre-made and in the can regarding this, so never mind. Here's hoping it is not difficult to get fully back on the wagon again afterward.

**

I was not fat as a child. When I look at pictures, I see that at age 7-8 I had chubby little knees in my Brownies uniform but that seemed pretty normal and was shortly gone. Around age 13 in part due to circumstance (trapped in a tiny house in steaming heat with no A/C and a fridge/freezer of ice cream junk food, for 2 months), I gained some weight again but by 15 if not sooner that was gone, and by 16 I was thinner than I'd been since age 12. Age 18-20 I could have lost 10-15#, but was pretty fit despite that and feared no bikini despite that.

(I was a waitress in a 24/7 beach hotel/restaurant when I was 18-19, working the graveyard ("bar rush" at 2am) shift. All the others were much older women by 20-40 years. They gave me major grief about how my nurses's white uniform dress (with that frilly little black apron!) was far too long. I thought I had knobby knees and was shy. They gave me SUCH grief about it that finally one day I lost my temper, went home and hemmed that damn dress so short that every time I reached up to the lighted pie shelf the entire restaurant got a free show. My tips went up dramatically and immediately, was the interesting part. I probably would have done it sooner if I'd have known!)

I always had a real waist so the extra flesh in my hips and breasts just made me look very curvy. Maybe age 20-22 I probably could have lost about 20-25#, but it still wasn't much of an issue for me; 5'6" and I carry weight well (though at this point it's vastly too much weight to do so of course). I didn't get actually FAT until the 22-24 age. After which I was suddenly 200# overweight.

But the kid started gaining weight around age 8. It didn't actually seem like a big deal at first; she was starting to add chub at the same age that I had, after all, and mine had vanished.

But by the time she was 10, it hadn't vanished, it had just gotten worse. I was ambivalent, because I have friends who were fat as children, and they said that the misery at school couldn't compare with the horror of their mother, the one person who is supposed to love them unconditionally, being totally judgemental about it, often showing the same disgust and scorn and demeaning attitude that society brainwashes nearly everybody into. In this fat-phobic, ultra-prejudiced society, your child's fat reflects on you. The more insecure the mother, the more fanatic they get about making the kid live on disgusting food or half-starvation to try and force them into 'normal'. Sure there is lots of talk about health and the child's happiness but in my opinion, mothers who behave like that which I have heard about or met personally, have been a lot more about "don't make me look bad by proxy" than anything else.

So before every other consideration, I was determined that my little girl was going to feel unconditionally loved and always beautiful to mom. So initially, although SHE had begun really griping about her weight, I never said anything more than "I think you're beautiful" and "well sweetie I like you fine but if you want to change that, I can help you work on it." Eventually she took me up on that and I put her on low-carb with me.

She lost 5 pants sizes and was very happy!

She disliked the eating plan though, and once she was a good size again, got more and more obnoxious about staying on it. I was really trying to find and make food she would find versatile and interesting, to no avail. Her griping about the food and what she wanted and I wouldn't make, got so ridiculous that every single meal became a major drama. I started getting angry repeatedly, from frustration and sometimes impatience and hurt feelings.

After awhile, it became evident that this was not merely a dissatisfaction with food; it had become THE CONTROL ISSUE in our relationship. I really hate the chronic-trauma that teen angst can add to a parent's life; I have enough cortisol/stress issues in my life already without every meal becoming a war zone. I didn't escape a miserable childhood especially related to food, only to have more chronic misery around it as an adult.

Finally after talking with friends, I concluded that they were right: she was old enough that the bottom line was, she had to WANT to do it. I finally got fed up and burned out on it and said fine. And we ate 'normal' food -- per the Standard American Diet (SAD) -- instead of Low Carb for quite some time.

And she promptly gained the weight back. And more. And then she started her menses and suddenly and dramatically gained a lot more to add to it in a pretty short time. Stretch marks everywhere, poor baby. Finally she wanted to go back on lowcarb with me. I shrugged it off until she DEMANDED we go on lowcarb. And then I told her "only" if she'd quit "being that way" about the food, and eat what I gave her. She was desperate and promised.

I agreed that we would take Friday evening through Sunday evening off-plan for her party and our vacation on the condition she agreed we would be on meat&egg for several days afterward.

What we've been doing so far (the last month) hasn't been working really. I carry, at my current weight, about 25# of water weight. (It used to be more.) I've lost about half of it is all. She's lost about 7#. Yes I know that 13# and 7# in a month don't sound bad at all but at the start of LC when the water weight is supposed to come off, it should be more, particularly for me.

I've tried to consider what we've been eating. Lowcarb 'flat-out' wraps have a lot of gluten. And we've had deli meats a lot which probably have a lot of sodium. We've greatly reduced our diet soda intake, sometimes with iced tea and sometimes with water. We've had a couple lowcarb treats and a couple lowcarb pancake experiments, but we have lived almost entirely on chicken dishes and plain hamburger patties for the last month. I'm disappointed we have not lost any 'real' weight (non-water weight). Perhaps our calories are actually too low.

When her birthday-fest is over, I thought I should make a vastly bigger effort to ditch the gluten wraps and deli meats. Maybe that will help at least with losing the last of the bloating. I've never had it take so long for the water weight to fall off me. (It's not just an assumption based on the scale. There are parts of my body I know well and know what they are like when I'm fully LC.)

Finding foods that she can eat 'as much as she wants of' is the hard part. She isn't a huge meat fan really; she can put up with chicken and burgers but not much of anything else and she isn't that fond of those. She doesn't like eggs unless buried "in" something. And anything with carbs (even peas or cheese) she could eat almost without stopping and really over-do bigtime.

It really is a problem when people (seemingly since near birth) seem to ONLY like sugar-based foods (carbs) and have no interest in anything else. That was my problem, and it's her problem.

She doesn't like many veggies; she does like peas (only if drowning in butter) and broccoli/cauli (only if drowning in cheese sauce) but aside from that she really only likes potatoes and sweet corn (drowning in butter). And every kind of grain known to man, of course.

It is just HELL trying to come up with stuff to EAT that she likes! Without eating the same things daily and burning out on them quickly. Without cooking stuff that takes tons of time.

Low-carb is hard enough with one person. With a second person who has radically different tastes and limited likes, it is really a lot more complicated.

And when the second person can make every meal into a dramatic multi-part play -- because that's just the way kids that age ARE -- it's just exhausting!

I get so weary. It makes it easier to go offplan because I just feel overwhelmed by it.

PJ
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Pestomania and Big Green Cooties

2009-07-26T03:48:00.004-05:00

I loathe most vegetables.

When my big brother and I were kids, he used to tell me that I had "green and purple cooties". As far as I was concerned at age 5, which has not changed yet at age nearly-44, most green veggies are just Big Green Cooties.

I have recently given up on the idea that I will ever be able to force myself to eat foods I dislike. I can't tell you the number of times I have filled my refrigerator with nothing but healthy, beautiful produce foods, spent all my money on them and had no more for anything else. And then stood in front of the refrigerator until the hairs in my nose frosted up (to quote Erma Bombeck there), starving -- and then walked away hungry. Repeatedly. Until I was in a "health fast for days" and the produce was composting in the fridge. When you will literally STARVE rather than eat something, it's pretty apparent you don't like it and that mere 'suggestion', including 'driving hunger', is still not enough to force it down your throat.

Why on earth I ever thought that "just because I was on a diet plan" I should miraculously be able to eat Big Green Cooties is beyond me.

It seems evident that my primary weight gain and maintenance of that despite obviously insufficient calories over the years, aside from probably relating to thyroid/adrenals and other hormonal issues, is at least in part an issue of malnutrition. Massively insufficient protein, amino acids, vitamins, minerals, etc. for most of my life. My body's adapted to it somewhat -- by slowing my metabolism down somewhere below that of a tree sloth -- but that doesn't make it ok, it just keeps me fat.

So I asked myself what I can do to increase my intake of "things which are good for me."

I came up with the following list. This may or may not be a good list. I'm not suggesting it is a list for anybody but me. I'm just thinking out loud here because I have a blog and other people can be tortured by it I guess. I welcome any advice in the comments though.

My list.

1. Take vitamins. A good liquid multi is my base. A good (big dose, 4-10K iu daily) D3, E, K2, B-spectrum also.

2. Take minerals if not covered in the multi. Calcium, magnesium, potassium. (Did you know potassium deficiency has the same symptom-set as low thyroid and low oxygen?)

3. Take herbs where possible. The idea that I'm ever going to drink herbal tea regularly is right up there with the likelihood that I'm ever going to eat a lot of green veggies, despite what a charming fantasy that was in my head. I imagined me sitting down quietly with green tea each morning, with incense and classical music and -- ok, not gonna happen. So if herbs enter my body it's got to be in capsule form or as a spice, and really, how much spice can you eat anyway.

4. Take other supplements that my reading suggests might be useful. The research reports on capsaicin are mind blowing. Also I got cinnamon. And supplements such as gluten-ease for when I'm eating something with gluten or unsure if I am, and acidophilus for good-gut-critter well-being, etc.

5. Take supplements alleged to be important for thyroid. Lugol's Iodine Solution is famous but after further reading I decided that Carlson Lemon Cod Liver Oil and some Norwegian Kelp Tablets would do instead though I might add Lugol's later. Also, supplements alleged to be important for viral, parasite and bacterial immunity, such as apple cider vinegar. These are 'folk remedy' items but after seeing the number of testimonials regarding both I'm willing to extend some benefit of the doubt.

Which leads to the eating portion of the list...

1. Eat what I CAN eat in the 'green' category and eat a LOT of it.

OK let's see. What do I like?

A. I like Greek Salad. Mine, not anything bought. I chop to fingernail-size all ingredients: romaine lettuce; red or green leaf lettuce or baby spinach or all of them; green onions (scallions or spring greens) or red onions if you don't have those; tomatoes (paste like roma); peppers (of every kind and color possible); a few kalamata green olives; add some vinegar and oil (I use red wine vinegar and quality olive oil, though I once used avocado oil); then add some crumbled (I like garlic-herb type) feta. It is very different when it is all chopped small like that, vastly more moist, so that part matters. You let it sit in the fridge for quite awhile to 'merge flavors' which due to the small equal chop it does much more than anything normally called a salad.

I went off lowcarb several times when eating this because my now-ex-and-this-is-partly-why husband insisted on making (whole house overwhelmed with smell of it) and offering me garlic bread (in great quantity) with it, the ultimate accompaniament. But the salad is surprisingly decent. The feta and the vinegar and oil and the small pieces make it taste quite different than ordinary salad which I am generally not fond of. Please note the original Greek Salad should also use cucumbers, which I don't like and are carbier anyway, and often has those sweet pepperoncini peppers, and some people add herbs to their oil/vinegar combo. I find this best to eat when you have 'something else too' -- obviously, protein.

OK. So it means I have to eat a lot of it, because making it is a pain in the butt with all the chopping, so it's a lot easier to make a LOT of it and eat it regularly (also otherwise the remainder of your lettuce is composting etc.).

B. I like Everything-Salad-with-Chicken-and-Blue-Cheese (dressing that I make myself). This has basically everything that greek salad has except no olives or vinegar/oil and a larger size of ingredients, plus it adds anything possible -- cubed hard cheeses, nuts/seeds like pecan pieces or sliced almonds or unsalted sunflower seeds, cubed avocado -- and then adds bits of chicken either baked and chopped/shredded or stir-fried, and uses a yummy homemade blue cheese dressing, diluted/mixed with water to thin it out a whole lot.

It has the same rule as the Greek Salad: if I eat it at all, it's better to make a bunch of it and have it for more than one meal. Leave the dressing (and meat) off these until eating obviously.

C. I sorta-like Egg-Frittata/scramble. Basically just scrambled eggs but with chopped scallions and all kinds of peppers and roma tomato and sometimes some kind of meat. OK, I can eat that.

D. I simply adore Pico de Gallo. This is fine-chopped tomato, onion, peppers, fresh cilantro, with a little bit of lemon juice, salt and garlic, mixed together and let sit a bit in the fridge to blend. This is what you often get at mexican restaurants along with sour cream and guacamole on various plated foods. I have not actually tried making this to eat it on or in meats but I really should since I suspect I could eat it on nearly anything.

E. But my favorite food of all; if it could be categorized a food group, life would be better; is PESTO. Basil pesto. Versions of this vary in quality and taste for certain, but this may be the most wonderful food that ever saw green. You can usually buy this in containers in the deli, and you can freeze it for longer-term storage. It's not cheap, though I'm told Sam's Club has big economical containers of it. If you want to make your own, the ingredients are: fresh basil chopped fine; finely ground/powdered fresh parmesan or romano cheese; crushed pine nuts (in a pinch use some other kind of mild nut); minced or pressed garlic cloves; quality olive oil enough to make it thick-creamy but not liquidy, and some salt/pepper. You can eat too much pesto, if you try; your elimination habits will tell you their opinion.

My love for Pesto knows no bounds. Red pepper flakes may be the only 'supplement-food' I have ever loved as much or eaten on as many diverse things (meats, salads, eggs, etc.). So I thought I would record my few current foods that I use pesto in.

Have suggestions? Let me hear them! There are never too many ways to eat pesto!

PESTOMANIA

Mix it in with scrambled eggs. If you are able to eat lowcarb wraps of some kind, put it on the wrap and then put your scrambled eggs-etc. (best with peppers/onions/cheese) into that as a breakfast pesto burrito. Yum.

Spread it over a plain hamburger.

Mix it in with the hamburger before cooking.

Use it instead of mayonnaise in any kind of sandwich, wrap, even if on lettuce leaves or flax bread or anything else. Pesto with turkey and provolone is wonderful!

Use it instead of red sauce on lowcarb pizza-style stuff. In fact the first time I ever had pesto was on a vegetarian pizza my friend (a chef) made me! It is wonderful. Yes it even works on the Deep Dish Pizza Quiche. As well as on the many other ways to make pizza-variants (from savory mock danish and bowl-muffin and flax-bread or flax-muffin options as base [I've seriously wondered about just dipping the Protein Powder Donut Holes, that's how crazy I am), to the lovely Cleochatra's innovative cauliflower crust) -- whatever works for pizza-ish stuff, works with pesto.

Make any kind of meat but chicken/turkey is good for this, and get it into small pieces (small-piece stir fry is ideal here). Mix pesto into it when it's done cooking. If you add chopped peppers and scallions and tomatoes it's really great, even better. If you add more greens you end up with the chicken salad I described above except with pesto instead of blue cheese dressing and eat it hot instead of cold.

If you're going to add cheese to anything that has pesto I recommend either parm/romano or, if it's a hard cheese, something lowcarb and a little bland like jack.

As a cold variant on the above, make chicken/turkey salad (you can add boiled eggs if you like) but use pesto instead of mayo (or in addition) and ditch any mustard/relish. So: small-chopped chicken, chopped hardboiled eggs, chopped onion, chopped peppers, chopped tomatoes are good to add, a little bit of shredded jack is good here, and pesto, stir really well and refrigerate. It's a good cold salad if you have a fridge at work and it has both protein-meat and greens and certainly plenty of herb in the basil -- what's not to love?

Mock danish is normally something like 2-3oz cream cheese (nuke till soft), 1-2 eggs, sweetener (any kind) and optionally spices (eg vanilla, cinnamon), mixed up real well and nuked for 1-3 minutes (depending on size & ingredients) until mostly-not-too-wet. Some people add a little almond or flax or coconut meal to this to absorb liquid (esp if using DaVinci SF as sweetener/flavor) and/or to make it slightly more solid. It ranges, depending on ingredients and ratios, from being like bread-pudding to being like a wet sort of cheesecakey-muffin. Some people actually grill that like a pancake instead. Anyway, this base recipe is one of those (like bowl muffins or the pizza quiche) that literally has more variants than you have time left in your life to try, and is totally up to your imagination. They can be savory not just sweet.

Once, I added chopped chicken, rosemary, and I don't remember what else or the detail but it was 'ok'. Tomorrow I'm going to add some diced pepperoni, tomato, green onion, jalapeno (hot) or anaheim (mild) and coconut meal and a tiny bit of cheese, and then spread pesto on the top like a big muffin and see how that tastes. I'm guessing it will be wonderful. I'll let you know!

If you have ideas for pesto foods that I have not mentioned, please share them!

P.S. And ideas for getting veggies down your gullet when you don't like them are welcome too. ;-)

PJ
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Bacon Mushroom Parmy Chicken

2009-07-24T23:33:00.004-05:00

Tonight's dinner experiment was a variant mix of a few recipes I've had before. It uses one prepared item, about half a jar of alfredo sauce. It has dairy but no gluten. The measures vary depending on what you want so I don't have a solid nutrient count. The kid declared THE BEST MEAL EVER(TM) so I thought maybe I should blog it, though it's not all that original.

Bacon Mushroom Parmesan Alfredo Chicken

(Doesn't that title make you think that recipes are named like German words? Although if it were really like German it would be more like Baconmushroomparmesanalfredochickencookedinsquarepan -- all one word, haha.)

Ingredients
3 very big skinless boneless chicken breasts or equivalent
6 strips of bacon cut in half (and their drippings from frying)
~1 package of mushrooms (from 1/4cup to 1.5cup, whatever you have)
1/2 cube butter cut in thin slices (that's 1/8 cup or 4 oz for those without cubes)
handful of shredded parmesan cheese (1/4cup to 1cup, whatever you have)
half a jar (or 6-8oz homemade) alfredo sauce or some variant on that
baking pan (I used square 8")

Instructions
heat oven to 350 degrees F.
cook the half bacon slices (you want 3-4 per chicken breast) until ~ 1/2 or more done
put slices of butter over bottom of baking pan
put sliced mushrooms over the butter
put part of the parmesan lightly sprinkled over it all
cut fat off chicken breasts (if you wish) and season them both sides with onion powder, garlic powder, and the herbal season of your choice (I used Green Goddess dressing base from Penzey's, italian seasoning would work too) and place the chicken breasts on top of the mushrooms
sprinkle the rest of the parmesan over all of it, chicken too
place the strips of bacon over the top of the chicken breasts
pour the bacon grease from your few strips into the bottom of the baking dish
pour the alfredo sauce lightly all around the pan both on chicken and in the other areas (it should be enough to make it a little saucy but not enough to drown it)
Bake it at 350 for about 50-60 minutes.

When you're done, if you like you can take the pan drippings and mix it with sour cream, or cream cheese, or coconut flour, or some blendered cooked cauli, or NotStarch/ThickNThin, or whatever you like to use to make gravy-like concoctions. It is pretty edible even without the extra sauce though. Alternatively if you have one of those oil separators used for gravy, used that on the drippings and then just pour the non-oil part of that over the chicken before serving.

No nutrient counts here. Chicken and bacon = 0 carbs. The rest of the ingredients have some carbs but very few especially when it's divided up into servings.

The mushrooms were unusually tasty. Kid raved about them and I had to admit they were really good. Some mix of butter, bacon grease, and parm, plus a bit of the spices on the chicken just above, combined to make that unusually good.

I haven't really felt like cooking in eons but suddenly have the enthusiasm and energy. I haven't felt like doing anything to my house in months either, but woke up at 4am this morning and was inspired to clean out a few cupboard shelves and drawers and make tea and so on. Although I don't feel anywhere near ketosis yet (this is day 12 of re-starting low-carb), something must be working since I apparently have a lot more energy than before!

Maybe I will finally get off my butt and use my pressure cooker. I'm really crazy about the idea of coming up with a low low-carb pressure cooker recipe series. Just being able to cook a whole lot of meat in a very short time, and cook tasty but cheaper cuts so they are tender, seems like it would make the PC ideal for LC eating.

PJ
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10 Biggest Lessons for the Biggest People

2009-07-20T04:33:00.011-05:00

Most the best lessons in life come from what we mess up, and how we mess it up.

I have been on and off lowcarb for three years now. There are lessons, both from weight loss, and from lack of it -- and lessons both from staying on plan, and from falling off -- that I have learned as part of this process.

I thought to celebrate getting my ass back on plan here I would document a few of these lessons learned. Partly as a reminder to myself. But also so I can link some other people to it who I see are new to LC and around my size. These will not be short because I want to explain a bit, but I'll do it in a list.

As a caveat, of course this is my opinion based on what works for me and often others I've met and see in the same situation weight-wise. But everyone is different.

Also: I feel these are more specific to "supersized" people. Not just low-carbers, not just people overweight, but especially for people who are 300#+. Because there are some issues that are just a helluva lot more critical when you are 150#+ overweight than when you are 40# overweight, that's just the way it is.

So possibly worth what you're paying for it, but well intended, here is my list.

10 Biggest Lessons for the Biggest People

1. Nobody knows. Get over the idea that you or anybody else knows much of anything about your body metabolism. Everything you have learned from media, school, parents, and other forms of indoctrination regarding nutrition and bodies is (a) mostly wrong about most bodies anyway it turns out, and (b) with few exceptions, definitely wrong about yours. There are generalities between people, sure, but there is so little serious research done on morbidly obese persons (let alone 2x MO) that even the Ph.D.'s most expert in the world at this subject don't have all the answers. Or even many. So that means that no magazine article or lecturing coworker does either, ok? If your body was 'typical' of healthy college research subjects, it wouldn't be huge. Nobody knows jack about your body. Probably including you. So toss out everything you think you know, and ignore all the people who feel entitled to lecture you with their opinions, and start from scratch.

Because this is not just a diet or eating plan: more importantly, this is a learning process. Whether you succeed or fail in a meal, in a day, in a week, is less important to the "big picture" than what you learn about your body and yourself in the process. Knowledge is power; the more you learn about your body and yourself, the more power you have to improve things. That's going to take experimenting. It's going to take writing down what you're doing so that when you have results in any direction you can look back on it and understand what that means, and learn something. It's going to take NOT taking everything literally and not thinking that what others say is always true for you. Take advice from the best experts you can find (lowcarb authors are a good place to start) and then pay attention to what works, and doesn't, for you.

2. Protein matters more than carbohydrates. That doesn't mean that carbs don't matter or that you can eat a lot of them. It means that of the things which make me feel better vs. the things which make me feel worse, and the things which help me stay on plan vs. the things that send me spiraling into the pasta, the most important thing, more than every other consideration, is sufficient animal protein. In order to maintain a positive eating and moving plan you need three things especially: a) psychological enthusiasm, b) physical energy to DO it, and c) lack of overwhelming temptation to NOT do it (eg avoiding cravings, situational problems, etc.). Getting enough protein is a major helper in all categories.

Many supersize people err on the side of not eating, or eating an insufficient amount of protein especially, or eating too seldom. We think, "It's fine," or "I lived, so what" or "well it's a few less carbs/calories, so that's good, right?" No, it's not. Here's the deal: when appetite is low (and it's not ketosis) it's because metabolism is low. Eat the damn food if you want your metabolism to wake up. And if it's ketosis, eat it because you need the protein and aminos whether or not your body is more than happy to skip the calories. You feel fine today so you think you can not bother to make yourself lunch because cooking's a pain, right? But know that what it affects is not just how you feel right now but how you'll feel in 1-3 days. As well as contributing to the decisions you make for the next few days. Everything you eat is more important than the trivia of its moment.

I think this is moreso an issue for the largest folks, but in my view, the most important thing is not "not eating carbs" but rather IS "eating protein." MEAT IS FOOD. Everything else is nature's extra vitamins and treats. Unless you eat A COW it's nearly impossible to get too much protein in your day (because animal protein is damn filling and you have a lot of muscle-bone-tissue to feed that is NOT fat), though it's important to spread your meals/intake out through the day. [Edited to add: I changed my mind. Meal spacing is mostly a myth and for bigger people it's probably better to do it differently. See Myths of Fasting.] Find out your minimum protein needs (get the Drs. Eades' "Protein Power Life Plan" book as a good start) and eat at least that much every day. If you have to err in either direction, do it with more, not less. You can experiment with what is best for you in this area over time. Some people may find less protein is better for their unique body. But if you are supersized, to begin with, EAT MEAT.

3. The foods you choose matter more than the carbs you count. If you are supersized, it is probably not going to make too big a difference whether you eat 8 carbs or 35: the goal of a ketogenic diet is a ketogenic state, and you can experiment and see what you can eat daily and remain there (the amount of carbs you can eat and be ketogenic does vary by person and over time). At that point pay more attention to what is going in your mouth. I am not referring to vegetables or organic here, I'm referring to the larger picture of how food affects your body and mind, not just today but between now and 72 hours from now.

You may think that when you decide, "Oh to hell with it, I'm going to have beer and pizza just this once!" that it is a spontaneous decision. I have learned about myself at least, that this is wrong. Food is a chemical in the body and all chemicals are drugs, for better or worse, and all drugs will affect your body and your mind is part of your body. My state of mind, energy level, psychological enthusiasm, emotional stability, physical strength, carb craving, and more are directly tied to the previous week of my eating, with the most effect actually coming from 2 days before (oddly!) but really being a composite of the previous week, with the days closer in time having the most impact.

Pay attention to how foods affect you. It's perfectly fine to eat something if it's within your general nutrient-goals, but not if its ingredients turn out to trigger more interest in carbs and less interest in protein in you within the next 24-72 hours. (If you're thinking, "I don't have food triggers," and you are more than 40# overweight let alone 200# overweight, I suspect you might not know your body well enough yet.) Food intolerances are also often undiagnosed and can be an issue in triggers or symptoms, probably as much or more for the supersized -- as it may be possible they contribute to that condition in one or more ways. (Gluten and dairy being two of the most commonly undiagnosed.) Find whatever foods make you feel good and strong and do not inspire you to eat poorly 1-72 hours from then, and eat those. I don't care if "other people" are lowcarb and eat a certain food and it works for them. You are not other people. Foods that fit the numbers and do not trigger you is what matter most.

If a lowcarb wrap has only 6 ecc but the gluten gives you mild asthma or the wheat sparks some gnawing desire in the background to eat other wheat-ish things, it is NOT ok. This is not a dietary plan for the paper it gets written on, it's a plan for YOUR body. Once you are ACTive rather than REactive concerning your diet, then you can focus in on the vast array of lovely foods you 'can, in theory' eat because X oz. of it fits within your carb limit. Something being lowcarb is not nearly as important as it being something that doesn't trigger you. A carb limit per day is not an excuse to eat anything up to that number. This is not just about numbers. It's about your body. What you eat and how it affects you is critical.

4. Survival beats idealism. There are so many good points of advice for healthy habits and eating. But let's just focus on what matters most here: if you are hundreds of pounds overweight, getting some fat and bloating off you promptly probably matters more to your health and longevity and staying with a new plan than whether you had 3 servings of veggies or your meat was free-range or your butter was organic.

If you have been on lowcarb a few months and learned something about your body and the eating plan, then you will probably find your way into foods that are more convenient, bulk-made, freezeable/nukeable, healthier, more organic, more 'whole-food', etc. You will learn to cook more or better to fit the plan. You will learn what you can do quickly, what requires little if any cooking, what is best for lunch at work, and more. All that will come with time. But when you begin this effort, up front, focus on whatever you have to do to make lowcarb with sufficient protein happen. Focus on whatever makes it feasible for you to succeed in staying on plan, because that's what matters most.

Lowcarb is a vast adaptation for most of us, not only changing habits we've had for decades but forcing a different behavior in the midst of an overwhelming cultural norm about food (and even in the face of overt cultural bias). If you aren't really going to eat veggies because you don't like them, trying will only be a drag, that isn't practical or long-term. Find something else you might like instead, maybe some homemade guacamole on a burger. If you hate everything green, then don't eat it. You can work on your resolutions for the 'details' of your diet and how you might like to improve it once you are in the swing of things. One thing at a time! Initially let's just make sure you can stay ON the diet OK? If you are working 70 hours a week and find that eating pepperoni & mozz nuked, or cooked burger patties defrosted and nuked, or some cold precooked tyson chicken breasts dipped in ranch, is more workable for you then a long list of seemingly healthier foods, then do it!

If you keel over dead you're not going to have time to worry about the organic or unprocessed rating of your lunch. First rule is to 'to do' it; 'how' you do it comes second. Drop the carbs, drop some weight, get yourself into a solid keto state with consistent animal protein and start to make it a habit. Get yourself to the point where you can stay on lowcarb without being at risk of "inconvenience" (of a dozen different kinds) driving you off, and THEN you can start obsessing on the smaller details. This change in eating plan is a LOT to take on at once--more details than most people can imagine, more habits and triggers and situations and issues than most realize. Don't make it worse, don't overcomplicate and overstress over every detail.

Here's my motto: Do the best you can, and live long enough to do better. If you aren't eating on plan and you are supersize, your LIFE is in danger, period. Start dealing with that issue via lowcarb pronto!, via whatever foods work for you up front with your likes, habits and schedule (and body-triggers), then worry about refining the details as you go.

5. Find people who have succeeded and learn from them. The lowcarb forums online have quite a few people like this, of both genders, of every age and size and former-size. Lowcarb for the supersized is not a temporary diet, it's a way of life if it's to do even half the good you hope. Books are great but they are written for the masses. Individuals who have faced all the trials and learned from them are more likely to be the dose of realism in your life.

6. Deliberately plan "adaptive" behaviors for when things are difficult. When you find yourself obsessed with food all the sudden (it can happen), eat protein immediately (preferably protein+fat), and if you still are focused on it mentally, then "plan" on it. I have spent hours reading internet lowcarb recipes for delicious chocolate concoctions that in fact, I have never made and probably will never make, but because I was able to focus my obsession of the moment on reading rather than eating, by the time I finished gathering all my recipes and grand plans, it was either time for bed anyway or the huge hamburger patty I ate had finally diminished all interest in seriously diving into the kids' halloween candy or a delivery pizza. Learn how to re-focus your attention during the times when your attention is heading for the carbs.

7. Don't attach dates to weight goals. Nobody can predict how fast they will lose weight. The same eating plan that will drop pounds off you at lightspeed will also see 1 lb per month fall off some other time. I'm sure you'd like to know why, and so would every other overweight person on earth. There are a million variables here and even the best research doesn't yet have the answer. So unless the aliens landing on the White House lawn bring that information with them, it's probably going to be a mystery to humans for awhile more. This is a long-term project and attaching specifics to a process-result you really only have partial control over, that is subject to a myriad of variables we don't even know let alone control, is setting yourself up for disappointment.

What matters is that you are focused on what works for you TODAY and planning for the rest of the week. One step at a time here. Your only task is "the next meal". What matters to your goals is having respect for whatever you are accomplishing--and it's not always reflected on the scale (that's a separate item). If you can do this, you can stay on plan, and realize, "Wow, six weeks has passed!" and you've lost weight. It may be more, less, or the same amount of weight as what you hoped to lose during that period. Oh well! What matters is that you had six weeks of not getting fatter, six weeks of not eating stuff that drove you offplan, six weeks of feeling strong and knowing you have a better future, six weeks of probably getting more body-motion in than you would have otherwise due to feeling better, six weeks more practice at something that your life and future depend upon.

I see people coming into lowcarb with a Big Idea, they're going to lose exactly X# in a year and they want to find every great 'success story' of rapid weight loss and calculate the odds and how much per month that is and try to decide what they can plan on based on that. If you are supersized, just plan on being HEALTHIER. Stronger. Clearer. If you can make that happen, everything else will fall into place to whatever degree other circumstance are going to allow. There is much debate about diet and exercise and the degree to which it helps lose weight, but of one thing I can assure you, even without a medical degree: Angst over the speed of it will not help at all.

In the end, it doesn't matter. If you feel like you might just die if you can't be 150# thinner in a year, I understand totally, but grow up: in a year you will be a year older anyway, and you can either be as thin as eating well and lowcarb gets you, however much thinner that might be, or you can be the same weight you are now or worse because unrealistic expectations brought such disappointment it drove you offplan entirely. Would it at least be better to lose a little, than to lose nothing in a year? Yes. So focus on doing the right things and let the weight take care of itself at the schedule your body is capable of. Usually you will find in the first six months especially that it works just fine.

8. Health is a bigger issue than the scale, and weight loss can come in cycles. Everything else in your body is cyclical, from cellular growth to hormones to brainwaves, so why should this be so different? There are going to be times when you lose weight on the scale. There will be times you see no effect whatsoever. (That doesn't mean that stuff is not going on inside your body.) There will be times when you realize you're not losing weight but your clothes are getting looser. Or your energy is getting higher. Or your flexibility and strength are expanding. There are a lot of ways to measure "improving health" and the scale is only one.

If you are eating well, but not losing weight, but you're out on your knees working the garden in a way you couldn't do or didn't have the energy for even when 50-150# lighter, then I think it's obvious that lowcarb IS helping. If you place all your focus on the scale you are merely going to get demoralized when that particular part of the overall health cycle is not showing results for awhile. It isn't SUPPOSED to show results all the time! It will cycle. This has probably been the hardest lesson I'm still working to absorb of anything. We put all our enthusiasm focus on what the scale says and that's ridiculous, because many of the most important things, whether mental or physical, probably happen internally for awhile first and only show up clearly on the outside in the medium to long term, as a follow-on related to that quiet internal change, anyway.

9. Anybody can do weight-bearing exercise, and that's the kind you need. Forget cardio, and I don't just mean because of the many arguments against it comparatively, or because it's way more dangerous generally for supersize folks, I mean because everything is cardio when you're supersized anyway. What you need is something that focuses on strength training.

If you are so large or sedentary that you can hardly move, no problem: start with your arms, no weights. Lift them as many times as you can. Write down the number, even if it's one half of one. Do it again the next day or in a few days and work to do a little bit more. Put a chair by something you can grab onto and stand up, using your arms as needed, but using your legs as much as possible. Hold onto something and lift one leg straight up as much as you can, even if it's two inches, hold as long as you can and put it down. Nearer my high weight I did "froggies" -- squatting on the ground with my hands flat on the ground between my legs, for as long as I could hold it. It was hard to get there, and I had to roll over sideways to get out of that, and it took 5 minutes to get up off the floor! Pitiful! So what? That did more to strengthen my hip flexors, the muscles used for lifting your legs, than anything and that made a huge difference in my ability to move around.

If you're in slightly better shape, do Goblin Squats -- these spread the legs, point the feet outward, put the arms up high, and can allow decent form for back even if you're really large and usually non-injury to knees (regular knee bends/squats can be problematic when supersized). If you can buy a weight bench, barbell and dumbbells, awesome. If you can't, lift the cans of diced tomatoes or something.

Atkins once wrote, "Exercise is not negotiable." You NEED to exercise for so many reasons. It's not just about weight loss. It's not even just about muscle gain and hence metabolic increase (e.g. that as I once read, 3# of muscle was the caloric metabolic equivalent of jogging 21 miles per week, or something like that). [Edited to add: Turns out that's a myth. Oh well!] It's also about reducing insulin resistance. If you're really fat, you've got a problem with that, pretty much guaranteed. It's also about increasing the blood/oxygen flow to every part of your body including your brain and this can have important results on health. Be sane, don't hurt yourself, just like with dieting, don't make unrealistic goals. Just do it. Each time you walk through the living room do something. It does not have to be a gym membership. If you just do it, even in small but consistent measure, you will find you are much more inclined to 'move' as time goes on.

I need to mention one thing: I honestly thought, at one point, that the reason it took effort to step up on a curb, or one foot at a time on steps hauling myself up with the arm rail, etc. was because I weighed 400#. That was A TOTAL LIE. A total lie! When I drop all the bloating that carbs and food my body doesn't like gives me, when I increase the strength that finally getting enough protein (so the body isn't busy re-building half its muscle daily) gives me, I could do tons of stuff I could not do when 150# less, because it is not just about how much weight you're moving around, it's also about how much strength you have to move it, and how much internal-bloating/inflammation is gunking up the inside process. I shoveled compost and placed brick and raked and mowed etc. at 400# and knew people who at 300# could hardly walk "because they were so fat." Baloney! It is not because of fat it's because someone is not FIT. And you can work on getting fit at ANY size. So what if it's pitiful at first. Start where you are. Do a little all the time. Two months from now you'll be doing better. A year from now, wow, who knows? Just DO IT. Understand that "feeling strong" is not just physical. It will make you feel that way on other levels too, important areas for your overall drive.

10. Find a mental model that works for you as focus, and use it. If you are religious, pray about it. Every day. Schedule a time to talk to God. If you can schedule time with your dentist why not with God? If you're metaphysical, meditate. Do affirmations. If you're an atheist (or any of the former), learn self hypnosis. Take time for yourself each day to focus on feeling positive about yourself, your future, etc.

Whatever way this works for you, the point is that there is no full separation of body and mind and if you want to get your body in line you need to work on getting your head straight too. Every highly successful person, from CEO's to athletes, knows that your mental focus is a huge, absolutely enormous portion of success. Any 'motivational' program, book, video, etc. can be usefully applied to this healthy goal, so you might consider looking for stuff like that if you think it will help inspire you.

Don't look at your new grand plan for yourself as 'a food thing' alone. That's merely one part of the equation of your overall health and well-being. You should also MOVE, and you should also FOCUS, and whatever way you have of doing those three things, work it out! I have found that any one of the three areas helps to support and promote and maintain the others. And just like with your food intake, your efforts in any one area have impact on more than just the moment of time when they occur.

If you need help, advice, encouragement, inspiration, find the lowcarb forums online and make some friends. This is hands-down the most friendly supportive group of people I've encountered in 14 years of living and working on the internet. It's like the virtual equivalent of the Irish bar: you are already welcome there just because you're already one of them. Lean on people, ask questions, and look for how you can expand your vision to what is healthy life-wide: you are more than what you eat.

As last notes:

You matter. Your life and future matter to you. Your food, your movement, and your focus matter to your life and future. Every day you can learn something about yourself. Every mistake is a lesson learned. And let's get real: there's not a person on earth or a practice on earth that is new and different that a person just picks up and does perfectly, indefinitely. You're going to screw up now and then, but don't consider it failure, consider it a learning experience, just like playing a wrong note on an instrument or missing the hoop wildly in basketball, and keep going. Sometimes people even go offplan for long periods. Regain a bunch of weight. I see people say they feel like losers as a result. Nobody's a loser until they're dead. Until then your next opportunity to make a proactive and real change for the better in your life is only "your next meal away".

If you DO this, there is no way that you will not be improved by it--one way or in many ways. If it seems overwhelming, quit thinking about it! Pick some little thing and just do it better than yesterday and keeping adding more little things daily. When it gets hard, whether physically, practically, or emotionally, talk to other people with experience. Chances are they'll have ideas or perspective that set you straight and make you feel better and help you out in tangible ways.

Whatever or however you choose to approach your eating plan, if you're supersized it's a long term and permanent project. No "10 pounds to bikini summer" hype for you! It's less relevant whether you eat or don't eat any given specific thing as that you learn how your body reacts both to eating that specific thing, and to the intake of that overall nutrient set (e.g. how much carbs/fat/protein per day work for you at any given time). If you can eat fruit, dairy, cheese, wheat gluten, and still lose weight and feel great, then do it. If you can't, then figure out what's in the way, get rid of it, and do what you need to do. Write it down. Type it out. Make a plan, change it as needed, set it motion, and consider everything that happens along the way -- good, bad, or indifferent -- to be part of the educational process.

A year from now you will not only have less fat but you will be in better shape, more centered, and much more expert at the entire process.

It's worth doing! You are worth your doing it.

Best,
PJ

Morbid Obesity: Protein Salvation

2009-03-24T14:45:00.004-05:00

I gripe a lot. Hell, to hear me tell it, you'd think I was like Atlas with the world on my shoulders, slaving away on .07 carbs a day with no weight loss for a century. But really, my history is like this:

My high weight was around 520. I had no scale. I had to estimate, when the grain elevator later told me 482 and I knew I'd lost some. By the time I joined a lowcarb forum online I was 467. A little less than 4 months later, I weighed 395. (I bought an oversized digital scale so I could tell!)

In the last 26 months, I have mostly eaten lowcarb. I have failed dismally at incorporating many veggies into my diet--I don't like them generally, is why. I have not done well at drinking fluids, and only just a week ago 'cut down on' diet drinks to maybe 1 drink every couple days. I have not done well at taking vitamins until a couple months ago when I finally got that act together.

I've had several periods where I was off lowcarb altogether, and eating an astonishing amount of crap food, apparently in the childish stomping-tantrum of, "If I'm going to be fat anyway, and not lose weight even while eating well, then I'm going to eat what I want! Nyah!"

In 26 months I have lost 20 lbs. I didn't just become a lowcarber, I became the Undead: apparently I am stuck "for eternity" unchanged, it feels like.

But the majority of time, I have been eating lowcarb. I have varied between under 30 to 70 carbs/day.

Note: I recently blogged about exercise and morbid obesity over at Tomboy Tough.

But it's really all about protein. How much energy I have today depends directly on how much protein I ate yesterday, and indirectly on how much protein I ate the two days before that.

I've gotten to the point where I think that insufficient protein might be the second biggest problem for the morbidly obese. Animal protein is my food salvation. I think even if a person didn't want to do lowcarb, or was temporarily off LC, still, getting enough protein -- like 100++g/day -- is just critical.

It's the difference between 'bounding' up my porch steps vs. walking them slowly with one foot on each like a little girl.

It's the difference between not even eating enough because getting up to make food takes too much energy, vs. feeling cabin fever and can't wait till I get off work to walk down to the store and then do some yard work for a few hours.

It's the difference between 'living' and 'existing'. Between feeling optimistic and interested vs. feeling just glad to get through another day. It's life-changing.

I know of people who at just over 300 can't walk without crutches, ride on carts in the stores, etc. Nearly everybody I see on the carts in walmart and that's a lot of people, is smaller than I am. I'm currently at 370 and I'm out doing landscaping work that works muscles in a way I literally could not have done at any previous time in the last 15 years.

I am finally getting it sunk into my head, slowly but surely, that MEAT IS FOOD and everything else is peripheral -- fun, nature's vitamins, but food=meat.

Lowcarb by its nature gets credit for two hugely important things that the title doesn't mention. First, getting enough protein, possibly for the first time in many peoples' lives. Second, by sheer accident, my initial LC trial got me completely off grains/gluten -- and milk. Severe asthma, allergies, severe acid reflux, brain-fog and a host of other problems literally just vanished. I honestly think these two points are nearly as important as actually lowering carbohydrates... especially for people who are morbidly obese.

I understand now why the Drs. Eades called it 'The Protein Power Life Plan' and not 'The Low Carbohydrate Life Plan'. Somehow I managed to go lowcarb but focus vastly more on the carbs I couldn't have, the carbs I shouldn't have, than the protein I MUST HAVE to function in a way resembling a healthy person.

"Eat Meat or Die." That's pretty much my motto now because it has to be.

My weight isn't going much of anywhere for a long time, but that doesn't mean I can't build muscle, build oxygen adaptation, and get a lot healthier--even if nothing else changes. So that's my focus for now.

I'm sorry it's been so long since I posted here.

PJ
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What to DO With All These Eggs? Need Ideas!

2009-01-17T18:53:00.008-06:00

I live in a small town. We have no health food stores. In fact, since the local expansion to Super-Walmart, we now have very little else; other grocers in the city closed down not long after S-WM made their mark. There is a teeeny grocer a few doors down from me, fortunately, but that's it.

So on the internet, people are always waxing on about organic this and that. I laugh. Ha ha! Like I'm going to find organic stuff ANYWHERE short of driving an hour up Interstate 44, over the state line and into Joplin Missouri, a relatively large city that locally appears to famous for an interesting combination of things, such as "having the only halfway real (if mostly chain) restaurants in 100 miles" and "having the largest gay/lesbian population in the Midwest" and "having actual health food stores and metaphysical bookstores."

(How the middle one got in there I don't know, but I attribute some relation to things like the first and last to it. Some degree of 'thinking outside the box' like health food stores and metaphysics does seem to parallel that culture, if my coworkers, based in San Francisco, are any clue.)

So when I find something in Wal-Mart that is organic -- rare, but it does exist -- it costs a small fortune. Too much for a single mom to easily splurge on without feeling more guilty about the money than about the non-organic butter.

So Regina Wilshire's advice to me previously had included really trying to find organic sources of eggs, butter, etc. in particular (high-fat foods). (I guess since toxins store in fat, this probably makes sense.)

One day I was standing in Wal-Mart pondering eggs. This had become a really major philosophical endeavor. There were various designations on eggs. Free range? Organic? Omega-3? I read the boxes carefully. It seemed to me that the ones most pushing how gloriously healthy the eggs and chickens were, had a rather narrow parameter for that. In my head I imagined some employee in muck-boots walking past chicken cages holding out a polaroid in front of the bars of a field under the blue sky, and this qualifying them as 'free range' -- "they saw field and fresh air daily!" or something.

While pondering deeply, some woman nearly ran her cart into me. I was not distracted from the important task of deciding whether ANY of the eggs were worth the substantial price more than "plain" eggs though, and I pondered without interruption, until my stepmother said, "HEY!" and broke my trance.

"Good grief! Must be FASCINATING reading," she observed, as I stood with two cartons of eggs in my hands.

"Which is better?" I asked. "And why do they all cost so insanely much? Does it really cost that much more to NOT torture chickens for eggs?"

She shrugged. "I have no idea. I buy the Omega-3 because they're healthier."

I pondered whether I should buy the free-range because I want animals to be treated well. But reading the fine print bothered me. I finally gave up altogether, after another look at the prices, and bought the typical eggs.

I was reading Craigslist online later on and what should I see, but an ad for organic eggs from someone with chickens. Now, it's not very near me, but I was going to the city at least sometimes back then (before my car died, sigh!) so it was an interesting chance. I worked out a visit, and I went to see the fellow.

He's an old navy guy, long retired, permanently on oxygen, living alone in a trailer house out in the middle of nowhere, on about 5-10 acres. As my kid and I walked toward the house, several of the stars of this show came to see us, clucking and fluffing and pecking in the grass and dirt. In the grass leading to a big field next to the house, I saw a duck waddling around.

The son of the fellow living there said, "My dad opens the barn door in the morning and they follow him out, walk around all day in the field and around the property, and in the evening they follow him back in again. He has corn in the barn in case they are still hungry, so they do eat that grain, but they also eat lots of bugs and things like that. The eggs range from off-white to darkest brown."

He was asking $1/dozen. Now given the eggs in the store are more than that, and they are crap comparatively, that didn't seem fair to me. I told him I'd pay him $2/dozen. And a month ago, seeing how the prices had gone up for eggs in the stores, I started paying him $3/dozen. If he were selling them IN a store he could get more than that. I am not averse to the price. They're good stuff. AND in spring through early fall, he has (unfertilized) DUCK eggs too! They're light green, large and awesome.

Every two weeks I buy whatever he has. This is in part because I know he needs the money, and this way he doesn't have to worry about finding someone else to sell to. Usually he was getting about 3-4 dozen a week, and the kid and I on lowcarb can go through a dozen a day between us. But my car blew a headgasket that is not fixable, I haven't money for another car, which has made it hard for me to get to him. He has driven out to me and I pay him extra for that. And I haven't been eating very many eggs in some time.

The eggs last a LONG time. WAY longer than I've ever seen a store egg last.

So today I bought what he had, which went back to end of December since I hadn't had a car to get to him (his son brought them to me).

Look at this picture. This is what I had in my fridge when he came. IN ADDITION to THREE DOZEN I had in a pan on the stove boiling.

To which I have now added TWELVE AND A HALF DOZEN MORE!

(No comments about my PROCESSED FOOD refrigerator there -- it doesn't always look like that, I swear. ;-))

OK, so I have several dozen in the drawer, 12.5 dozen in the fridge, and 3 dozen boiled. I can probably give away 6 dozen of the new ones to family. But that still leaves me with like 12 dozen left!

What the heck do I DO with all these eggs?? I mean it's only humanly possible to eat so many eggs at once!

Idea #1: I've decided I'll get some more yogurt and half&half, I have lots of frozen berries, and I will make more fruity-shakes with a little protein powder and a few eggs -- I could go through a few like that daily.

Idea #2: Since I just got my new container of organic non-hydrogenated palm shortening, I can have fried eggs. If I make a few strips of bacon, and then add some shortening, it's awesome for bacon-grease-fried-eggs... yum. OK I can go through a few like that daily.

Idea #3: No. I'm so sick of scrambled eggs I could vomit. So that's out.

Idea #4: I'm thinking if I made a quiche (or three??) that had onions, mushrooms, bell peppers, cheese and herbs -- lots of them -- I could freeze that, right? I've only kept those in storage containers in the fridge and nuked them. Do eggs freeze??

Idea #5: Deviled eggs. I can only eat so many of those though, and the kid doesn't like the white part so they're wasted, so not that one.

Idea #6: Egg salad. I can do a little of that, but we can only eat so much of that and it's a little carby and VERY caloric thanks to the mayo. Can you freeze egg salad??

What else?? Do you guys have ideas for what I can do to USE THESE UP in a way that maybe stores them for the future -- or at least gives me some way to ingest them I'm not sick of?

(If I chopped up the boiled eggs and dehydrated them, then what? Could I use the powdered eggs in some way??)

PJ
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Foodism and My Freezer Fetish

2009-01-15T19:32:00.005-06:00

Every time I return to lowcarb (and let's not laugh about that phrase -- why do I leave it??), I experience the same kind of humorous effect: Foodism.

Suddenly everything is defined by food. And every food is defined by its qualities. Not only that, everything ELSE is defined by food's qualities, or issues of diet. I can come up with analogies to everything from football to metaphysics, based solely on my lowcarb philosophy and food. It's like there is this giant filter that shrinks down into "lowcarb-colored glasses". I see everything through it.

So this cycle has a funny new element: I have become unusually obsessed with my freezer. You know how some people collect kitchen stuff with roosters, or everything that has clowns, or God knows what else -- a "collection" obsession. I have one. With me, it's about food -- in particular, lots of "stored food that is lowcarb and fast/easy to cook."

Having several times gone off lowcarb in part because there was nothing to eat, and what "else" I ate promptly led to even worse decisions, and because my child in my view is chronically hungry for some reason, I really want to have STUFF IN THE FREEZER. I have a huge freezer in the garage and a normal freezer above my fridge. I'm working on a gradual collection of these square 5.2 cup rubbermaid containers that freeze or nuke just fine.

I gotta make stuff the kid likes, although I like spicier foods. I make stuff that is CHEAP and FAST as much as possible. I crockpot all kinds of stuff, ladle it out into 'take-alongs' rubbermaid storage containers and stack 'em in the freezer. I can take one out when I know I need food tomorrow -- it's 2-4 servings for the 5 cups of food in the bowl. I mean 'real' servings, LOL, not the size normally allotted but what we actually eat. If I need to eat soon I defrost it in the microwave, takes about 30 minutes for that, then a few minutes more for each bowl to heat it.

I'm a proletariat when it comes to food, apparently. We try to have hamburger and eggs and bacon and shred-cheese around all the time since those are pretty much the details we do "around" our staples of "stew and meats" (still working to minimize the cheese thing).

Here's what I'm gradually adding to my freezer, at the same time we're eating the stuff. The beans are carby but make a big difference in quality, especially if when you're done, you use beaters to get rid of any burger chunks; the beans cook out and blend well so it's thicker. We are not VLC (very-low-carb <30) anymore, I will let it go to about 70 carbs a day but usually if we exceed VLC it's because of quantity eaten of something like beans.

The more meat and fewer beans, the more lowcarb it is of course. When I say "a bunch of" burger I mean, "most the pot is burger, with some veggies and beans and spices/sauce." Because these don't have highcarb fillers like potatoes or corn starch when it's over, much of their thickness is because they are dominantly MEAT.

Low-Carb Proletarian:

Bulk Crock-pot Freezer Food Galore

Burger Stew
bunch of cheap burger
every veggie you can find, cut small
bunch of seasoning, we mix taco and chili
a jar of spaghetti sauce
bunch of soaked shell beans, we mix black-pinto-red

Sloppy Stew
bunch of cheap burger like turkey burger
every veggie you can find, cut small, especially peppers/onions
a jar of spaghetti sauce
bunch of sloppy joe seasoning
bunch of soaked shell beans, we mix black-pinto-red

Turkey Stew, v1
bunch of turkey burger
Turkey stock from some previous turkey I baked (save in freezer)
(if I didn't have the real deal I'd have used water and a LOT of bouillon)
Onions, carrots, peas, mushrooms
bunch of soaked shell beans, we mix black-pinto-red
(v2 of this stew uses the remains of a baked turkey, instead of turkeyburger.)

Chili Verde
pork loin cubed and braised (grilled a little)
onions and peppers grilled a little, anaheim chili is good--tasty but fairly mild
Bunch of tomatillos, blendered (if you're lazy: few big jars salsa-verde)
Garlic, spices. Dump into crockpot on high for 7 hours till meat is much softer. This is not a 'stew' so much as 'spiced meat'.

Spicy Burger Chili
bunch of cheap burger
whole package of decased spicy italian sausage, cut up small
onions and peppers and peas and carrots and soaked shell beans
a jar of spaghetti sauce
Bunch of italian herbs

Chili with Beans
bunch of burger, any kind
all the onions/peppers you have
bunch of chili seasoning
a jar of spaghetti sauce
I use leftover taco or spaghetti meat to dump in this
if I have any roast I braise small chunks and add that too

Alfredo Stew
Cut fat off then chunk up as much chicken as possible, any kind
make alfredo or buy it in jars (I'm lazy, I buy jars!)
some peppers, onions, peas and mushrooms are good with this
good with italian spices and lots of peppercorns

I was shocked to discover that turkey burger at walmart sells for $1.79/lb in 3# packages. That's cheaper than even the cheapest beef burger in quantity. So we're going to be having a lot more turkey-burger stews from now on!

I hope in the next couple of days to experiment with using turkey burger and pesto. I love pesto but can't have pasta; it's great with chicken small-chunked, pesto and sliced peppers/chilis, some red pepper flakes; cook the chicken and peppers however you like then dump into the pesto, YUM. (If you like quick chicken dishes or often have cooked turkey/chicken, try the Mexi-Chicken Mixes I posted eons ago - good stuff!)

I have a 5qt and 8.5qt crockpot (and a small sauce/side-type). Basically I buy 6# of turkey burger ($10.74), 2# of shell beans (soaked at least 12 hours) (they're really cheap, that's usually about $1.50-$2), a jar or two of sauce depending on the thing I'm making (most are around $2.38ea at walmart -- alfredo, spaghetti, etc. so around $5), and whatever veggies are fairly cheap and bulky... green bell peppers, carrots, onions, and I usually add frozen peas (not super cheap but yummy), around $10 depending on what you buy and how much. I mix stuff in two huge bowls, chunking the meat as small as possible, then dump the contents into the two crockpots. I mix it a couple times while cooking and then usually use beaters to break up burger chunks.

The beans usually require cooking longer than the 5 hour norm I find, they're slightly crunchy if not cooked longer, even if they are soaked a really long time. If you're cooking a tough meat like cheap pork roast you'll want to do it as long as you can to soften it. If you're cooking peppers you should wait to dump them in until there's max 4 hours left (peppers 'turn' odd when overcooked in the crockpot... trust me on this, your digestive system will thank you). I usually make two things with similar ingredients but different sauce/flavor focus (such as turkey chili and turkey stew).

My 8 qt will give us each a bowl for dinner plus make 5 of the 5-cup containers to put in the freezer and another partial container to stick in the fridge for the next day. My 5 qt will make about 4 containers and a bowl for dinner. So I grant that overall it costs me about $30. But each container for us is at least 2 meals if not more, so that's about 21 servings (meals) total for that which is pretty damn good! My freezer's top-half fits a stack of ice trays and a couple small things, plus 18 of those containers. The bottom half of the freezer is usually a mess of everything-else. I have a big chest freezer in the garage that I put most stuff in that I don't intend to eat right away. Including these containers sometimes! At left is a rather bad cell phone pic the kid took for me to illustrate 10 containers in my freezer. ;-)

Since money's an issue for most single moms like me, it's cool to find stuff you can make that is yummy, requires cooking far less often, can be frozen indefinitely, can be just nuked for a quick meal, and is lowcarb 'real food'. If you make your own ingredients like spaghetti sauce it might be cheaper and a little healthier. If you grow a garden so you've got peppers and onions or peas from that, that's great.

Bulk food may be the only way I survive the long term of lowcarb.

PJ

Reverse Psychology and Low-Carb Parenting

2009-01-11T15:24:00.001-06:00

As a single mom, I sometimes think that it doesn't matter what the subject under discussion is: whether we're talking about eating well, budgeting, or why my dang bedroom still isn't painted, the answer to the question "What is the factor of most difficulty in this situation?" is always "parenting".

For quite awhile I was pretty miserably depressed over my body having lost interest in losing weight, despite that I seemed to be eating fine. Then my eating got 'iffy at times', which didn't help, but if the result is "not losing weight" no matter what you do, it gets rather difficult to convince yourself that you really should eat 'meat' instead of 'everything else'. I lost interest in blogging here because I don't want to be a bad example. I lost heart in talking to my friends in a forum because I feel like a poser if I'm not "doing" what I'm talking about well-enough.

Me and the kid ("R") as you may recall from ancient history of this blog, were on lowcarb together for awhile. She lost 5 pants sizes and felt great and was very happy. She lost interest after that though, and the more I leaned on lowcarbing, the more every single meal became a drama-queen event. She is 12 going on 15, 'became a woman' a few months ago, and is SO hormonal it's hard not to pity her frankly. Puberty to mid-teens is like 5 years of solid PMS.

But it became such an issue I finally said, "Fine." and we went back to eating some of what we used to eat, spaghetti with meat sauce and other kinds of grains (thanks to gluten I could barely breathe), and a lot of junk, whatever was fast and near and cheap. At times, I made an effort to be LC myself despite this but I just felt depressed and the urges didn't last long.

I regained a little weight, not a ton but enough to annoy me. About 20#. More than that, but the rest is water weight that will be falling off me over the next few weeks if I'm eating low-carb, so I don't really count that as a weight loss accomplishment.

Over time she has really regained weight. She's also grown a few inches. Her hips and scale weight nearly made me keel over when we measured this morning. I didn't weigh that much until I was 23 and definitely overweight, and I'm a couple inches taller. I tried not to hyperventilate; I try to be casual with her. "Yeah, that's too much babe, we'll have to get that off you, ok." I want her to understand it's possible and believe in it and know she is responsible for not sabotaging her own eating plan and mine as well.

So over the last month she has mourned her size and talked about going back to eating lowcarb. I shrugged, I made it seem like something I didn't consider her seriously interested in so I wasn't either anymore. No more fights 3x a day at meals, no more having a hard enough time making food for ME to eat several times a day let alone her when "she won't eat meat or eggs." About a week ago she admitted that she'd never really disliked meat but was just mad and wanted 'other stuff'. But every time she has brought up something I've basically shrugged it off. Once I said, "Aw, well, I'm fat, I might as well get fatter, it's too much trouble to eat lowcarb." Heh.

Last night she insisted that we "return to lowcarb" today. "Mostly meat," she says. She is insisting also that we take vitamins and drink water, and she wants to exercise a little. Now she insists; it is HER decision and I MUST support her in this, she says!

I tried to be casual. Sure, ok.

I did not leap into the air yelling HALLELUJIAH THANK YOU JESUS YAY-UH! and happy-dance around the room.

Some days, the world goes ok.

PJ
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The Long and Winding Road

2008-11-20T20:59:00.006-06:00

In the late 1990s I lived in a tiny town an hour North of Fort Worth Texas. I worked hours after work on my own time teaching myself web-stuff where I had access to the database and middleware. I would drive home around 10pm most nights, on the small two lane roads that wound around a slightly hilly terrain. And sometimes, there would be fog. The kind of fog where, with your brights on, with squinting and leaning forward, you are just barely able to see about one inch of the white line on the right side of the road, immediately off the edge of the right front corner of your truck.

It starts to seem like purgatory. You're just driving this endless, winding road, in the dark, in the quiet, and the only thing that keeps you from dying any moment now is your faith-fixation on that one tiny little piece of evidence of road.

That's how I've felt about lowcarb much of the last year, particular the last several months. There was a time when I could see the road clearly. I could see for miles. Very-Low-Carb ketogenic diet was my dream come true. Weight fell off me. I lost a ton of medical symptoms. I'd not felt so good since I was 21.

Then I 'sort of' quit losing weight. Or maybe I quiet eating as well plus got more impatient or something. But in the end it did seem to amount to at the least, a great slowdown in weight loss. Perhaps it had been too easy before, because it completely demoralized me when it happened. When I not only couldn't see fast results, but I'd do everything right and my weight would stay around one level on my weight chart--and then start creeping up!--I felt helpless. Angry. Embarrassed.

And I started getting worried about my blood sugar. I could eat sausage and eggs, a meal I've had often on LC, and get a serious headrush-dizzy from a blood sugar crash a little while later. I went out and bought a blood glucose meter etc. so I could try and figure out what was going on. On the bright side, my glucose was not way too high too long. On the down side, my fasting bg was 60-70 and it went to a normal place after eating but then it fell and KEPT falling. The numbers don't lie: I had insulin resistance to a good degree. I knew I'd started with it and it had improved. But I never got that with protein meals before. What changed? Did weight loss trigger something else in my body?

And I worried about lowcarb. Here I'm trying to blog like the poster child for it because it "saved me" and I'm loyal. But I felt like hell. Not until I added carbs -- I started eating more fruit (mostly berries but occasionally a small gala apple), and legumes like peas and beans, and now and then even a corn tortilla, and all the sudden, I felt SO much better. I was eating 40-70 carbs a day but I felt like a new person. That was the good part. The bad part was I didn't seem to be losing any more weight on that approach than the ketogenic approach. And I felt like I was 'betraying' ketogenic-lowcarb because it quit working for me. Didn't I just spend two years talking online about LC? OK now a big chunk of what I thought I knew, apparently I don't.

I thought I had replaced the rules of calories with the rules of carbs. I was willing to pick up that different belief system. But it wasn't really a different belief system. Same plot, different characters. This time the bad guys are South Americans instead of 1940s Nazis but it's the plot we all know. X is good. Y is bad. Do it right and all will be well.

But it turns out we don't really know what causes weight loss for supersized people. We know from empirical evidence that a lot of really fat people do ketogenic lowcarb and lose a lot of weight and often fast. And then somewhere around 100-150 pounds later, some of them stop losing weight. Their body has changed in some way. VLC feels bad. More carbs feel good. But neither are pouring the fat off like previously.

I used to feel like I was on my path. Like I knew the road ahead of me and I walked it confidently. Like I had faith that I could see that winding road way off into the sunset, to that ineffably blurry time when "I would be ... ok". It might take a long time to walk, but I had found the road, now it was just doing it. I felt confident about my positive future.

But lately I feel like I have lost my way. The road has vanished in a fog. Even the experts can't help much if at all; metabolism of the supersized has no decent research; it's clearly different somehow but who knows how. My friends have often run into the same issues I have, and they don't have any answers either.

"Why try?", I wondered. "Day after day after day and weeks later I'm a pound heavier instead of lighter." I got anger. I got despair. And then I got offplan in a big way, and for two months ate utter crap. Leaving me profoundly bloated, so asthmatic I couldn't breathe, I gained some weight, and other issues. It was like an attack against myself.

And then I got my act together again. Regardless of weight loss, I know what I need to be healthy. I'm eating meat. Caul & Brocc. Peppers & onions. Berries and avocados. Pecans. And because I have NO IDEA what I'm doing, where I'm going, how to get there, or if I'll ever get there, the best I can do "wild guess."

I'm now taking so many supplements you'd just laugh if you saw. I'm off all diet soda. I'm greatly reducing dairy esp. cheese. Is this my plan because it's a great idea? Well, it closely mirrors the "Regina's good sense" approach with the eating plan she outlined for me back in... March? Which I was unable to stay with because it was so rational and healthy. So if I do ok at this for a few months I'll be closer to succeeding with her advice than I ever have been.

But I'm not doing it because I have big hopes. I'm doing it because I'm lost. So why not. It's a path. I might as well take it. Frankly I am not overly hopeful. I feel like I lost my faith, lost my lock on thinking I had some idea how my body worked, thinking I could trust that if I ate lowcarb and didn't eat massive calories than I would naturally lose weight, especially with a BMR as high as mine. When this ceased to work anymore, it's like my whole edifice of beliefs about everything lowcarb just came crashing down.

I don't know what makes me have more issues with not-eating and then over-eating than ever in my life; I didn't have them until I lost a ton of weight. Like the protein-reaction, could this be something actually triggered by a sudden high weight loss? It took awhile to kick in, if so.

I'm doing lowcarb in the flesh right now, but not much in spirit. I'm only barely with it mentally. I know it's better for my health anyway. But I feel slightly betrayed. By lowcarb. By my body. That what worked initially has not continued to work. That I have no clear idea on what else to do. And no idea what will work.

I'm only barely on the lowcarb road. It's dark. It's quiet. It's foggy. And I'm just riding that inch of white line with little but desperate faith, because it's all I can see.

PJ
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Low-Carb Drama Queens at All Ages

2008-11-10T00:11:00.008-06:00

This post is going to be one of those posts that is embarrassingly honest, at the risk of making me -- and my kid -- significantly less "cool".

Even the lowcarb world has its own version of what is cool and what is politically incorrect. Not surprisingly, anything which does not begin and end with "I eat lowcarb and it's the answer to the universe" is on the un-PC list, and lucky for me, so far, LC really HAS been at least part of the answer to my health universe, so I can't diss that shining ideal. But it hasn't yet been the whole answer, which is perhaps no fault to LC, it just means there's clearly a larger question, and it probably starts with 'nutrition' and possibly exercise involvement, as well as micronutrient (not just the macro of carbs/cals/protein) intake, as well as a drama queen getting off her supersized butt and doing it consistently.

Oh wait, you mean my own effort is supposed to be part of the process here?! Oh yeah! I forgot! (And to think, I was all set to blame Atkins, because we all know that his falling on ice is the reason I eat too much peanut butter and why we should keep buying Nabisco chips. Anybody who doesn't see the connection here hasn't been reading enough modern AP newsline 'public relations versions of ridiculously bad alleged-science studies funded by food producers' marketing designed-as-news.)

Aside from "the rest" of the answer to my health, whatever it(s) may be, there is another issue that lowcarb hasn't yet been able to solve: the issue of a single supersized (5'6" ~370#) 43 year old mom and her obese (~5'2" 180#) 12 year old daughter, hereinafter referred to simply as: The Low-Carb Drama Queens.

Drama Queen cue: "Good Morning!", also known as, "Mo-ommmmm, I'm hungry, make me food! What is there to eat that isn't meat or eggs or dairy or gluten-free almond/flax/coconut and can be made quickly 'cause I'm starving and you have to work?"

Answer: nothing. You will learn to like eating eggs and meat and almond/flax/coconut concoctions 365 days a year or you can starve. Alternatively, you can eat green vegetables (which you loathe). Don't complain. Your friends live on McDonalds and can wear skinny jeans. If you don't learn to live on chicken and flax you will cease fitting into your size 16 stretch denim leggings which already look like they are about to bust 4 seams simultaneously. And Mom will just continue being the size of a refrigerator but slightly better looking.

Should you successfully live on meat and glutenless other-things three times a day for the next seven days plus no bad snacks and no sneaking food in the night, your total reward for this impressive 168 solid hours of dedication will be: er, probably nothing. You might, maybe, have lost a pound, although increased exercise or muscle retention may in turn be making that seem worse instead of better. But you are supposed to have faith that if you combine those 168 solid hours of effort into another round and another round and another round that eventually you will see actual results. No, this does not equate to mom's belief in the tooth fairy.

Drama Queen negotiation: well can't we have enough cheese to stop a German tank in its tracks, like some Dairy Society version of Non-Lethal Weapons, with which we could completely obliterate the taste (and point) of having eggs or meat with the meal? Preferably also with something else high-fat for taste such as sour cream for example, or some lowcarb (but not when it's in quantity) ketchup?

Answer: well I suppose. There, I made you happy! Now, we just ingested a breakfast with as many calories as a federal banking bailout costs dollars, and hence the former experience will be just about as good for us as the latter. It is potentially true that if our overall carbs from all that cheese and sour cream managed to stay relatively low, we might not gain weight, but, given that (a) we can gain fat by even thinking of non-diet sodas (a medical process hereinafter known as "quantum soda metabolation") and (b) the carbs aren't real low in that case, well it's probably going to make things worse, unless (c) miraculously we don't gain fat from it, which merely means that (d) we managed to survive another meal and hours of life and get one meal closer to burnout and flying off the wagon in frustration, all without doing a damn thing about the weight problem.

Drama Queen cue: It's lunchtime, also known as "Mo-ommmm, make me food, I'm hungry! What can we have that isn't what breakfast was and isn't meat or veggies or funky flax/almond/coconut variants?"

Answer: nothing. You will learn to like eating eggs and meat and almond/flax/coconut concoctions 365 days a year or you can starve. Alternatively, you can eat green vegetables (which you loathe). Don't complain. It's not the fault of girls you see all over the place that they were probably born with genetics that make them thin while you were born to a 300# insulin resistant mother with high blood pressure and no prenatal care until 7 months and a lousy diet before, during and after pregnancy. No I'm not telling you that you were cursed at birth, your grandparents already tell you that, I always tell you that your destiny is in your own hands and we can get a handle on this if we work on it. Would you like some asparagus with that? No, of course I am not trying to make you vomit. We're going to have hamburger patties again. Yes, for the 1,928,834th time. Would you like some ranch dressing to dip that in?

Drama Queen cue: it's dinnertime, also known as "Mo-ommm, make me food, I'm hungry! What can we have that isn't lunch or breakfast and isn't meat or veggies or funky flax/almond/coconut variants?"

Answer: nothing. You will learn to like eating eggs and meat and almond/flax/coconut concoctions 365 days a year or you can starve. Alternatively, you can eat green vegetables (which you loathe). Don't complain. Your mother needs to be on a lowcarb eating plan and she actually LIKES meat. Whether this is because she is twice your size and an O positive blood type, vs. your A negative blood type, is unknown, and I heard that's all a 'fad' anyway. To salvage your having to eat meat... AGAIN... I am going to make the meat in a way that you can best stand. I will coat small chunks of chicken in parmesan and bake it and we'll dip it in ranch, or I will drown it in alfredo sauce and we'll bake it. Of course, now we just ate enough calories to ensure this dinner will not lose a single ounce of weight off our bodies, although it may, IF sufficiently lowcarb, prevent yet another ounce from being added.

Drama Queen cue: it's after dinner but before bedtime, also known as "Mo-ommm, make me food, I'm hungry! What can we have that isn't lunch or breakfast and isn't meat or veggies or funky flax/almond/coconut variants?"

Answer: nothing. You will learn to like eating eggs and meat and almond/flax/coconut concoctions 365 days a year or you can starve. Alternatively, you can eat green vegetables (which you loathe). Don't complain. Your growth hormone and many other things have been affected by your being self-sleep deprived and eating carbs before sleep most of your life, so we are solving this by ensuring any snacks are lowcarb. Here, have a string cheese. No, you may not have 11 string cheeses, have ONE.

Next Morning: Drama Queen darling, what happened to Drama Queen mom's cream cheese? Oh, you ate the entire bar with a spoon? And the peanut butter too? And all three of the lowcarb ice cream bar 'treats'? And drink the last six diet sodas? And the entire bag of (8-servings) peas, the legume (not-quite-a-veggie) you like nuked with butter? All while I slept? Despite my attempt to ply you with protein and fat so you wouldn't be hungry? I see. Oh, and you're hungry again because it's morning? Let's re-start that cycle!

End of the week: the scale says, "You ate 2.7 billion calories this week. Your carbs were fairly low, though. You have not really lost any weight. You did rebuild some muscle thanks to the extra protein-aminos. Hence, you have gained a pound."

Drama Queen mom considers her options.

1. Put the child in prison. Build a door at end of hallway that can be locked. Alternatively, explore "the child with the Iron Mask" scenario. This might, after all, lead to her become a rich, if resentful, book heroine someday. Unchecked: not yet tried.

2. Get rid of all interesting food ingredients that allow my average meals to be slightly more interesting, or that allow small treats, or occasional quick foods. This includes cream cheese, peanut butter, any lowcarb treat, diet soda. This leaves: meat. small amounts of cheese. Sometimes a veggie. Check: done. Result: now MY eating plan sucks totally compared to how cool it was before, my variety is lower, my treats are nonexistent, and I can't make anything that doesn't require 'cooking meat or eggs'.

3. Become Mom From Hell. Make food, make complaining about food before, during or after akin to a federal crime by so freaking out at any complaint that child is afraid to mention it. Child will eat it or mom will threaten to rip out her tonsils and stuff it in. Check: mostly done, with variants. I skipped the tonsils part. Problem: this only works in limited duration. Like any other kind of misery, you can get used to it, and then it loses its effectiveness.

4. ____________ please insert your better ideas here.

PJ, aka Drama Queen Mom.

Paying Attention and Water Weight

2008-09-21T10:42:00.005-05:00

OK, first I'd like to talk about something odd and kind of embarrassing.

In my last 12 week plan (ended mid-August), not quite halfway through, my weight loss slowed down vastly. To nearly a stop. By a little after halfway through, I had gained a few pounds and wasn't losing anything at all.

I was demoralized. At MY weight, I ought to be losing a helluva lot more weight. I stopped tracking my food, that "obsession taking over my life" since apparently it wasn't doing a damn bit of good. I kept forgetting to weigh... I told myself I didn't care. I was still eating mostly ok but I guess I just kind of gave up, angrily.

I remembered to weigh near the end of the period, which was a low weight even though only a couple pounds lower than I'd been like 10 weeks before, so I put it in my spreadsheet and abandoned lowcarb for a month of true hedonism. Not surprisingly, after a month of high-carb and gluten, I had asthma, allergies, massive bloating, zits, was exhausted, weak, and could barely move in the mornings.

I realized last week that I couldn't find a food log for the end of that period. Now, how can I look at what I was doing and say "This doesn't work for me so let's do something else," if I hadn't tracked it? ME, the measure-to-the-gram, USDA-obsessed, counts to-two-decimals freak?!

Well I went back to start another 12 week cycle. I'm an incurable optimist. I'm not going to be so obsessive about weighing food but I must return to what is right. I know that I eat lowcarb for some reasons that aren't even about fat. So even if I am not losing weight, I still need to eat well. My normal 'extremist' nature tends to make it one or the other.

And looking at my tracking sheet, I realized how much my psychology had been affected by weeks of demoralization in the middle: I failed to even NOTICE that by the end of 12 weeks, it had turned around and I had lost a total of 33 lbs in those 12 weeks. Now, I lost nearly all of that in the first 3.5 weeks. Then I lost nothing, then gained some, then lost nothing, and only re-lost a couple pounds and then a couple more at the very end of that period. Of course, understand that 20 of those "don't count" -- they are water weight I will gain/lose with carbs; I only really counted the others.

The problem is, I blogged about lowcarb not working the way it did for me, and while it IS true that it definitely does NOT cause the degree of weight loss with me it did initially, I think I was injust to lowcarb, inaccurate and not by any possible means fair when I griped about 'no results'. I wonder if I am more psychologically sensitive due to the degree of my weight, or if I just quit believing in it in my despair, I quit paying attention, and so made some assumptions that weren't fair.

Anyway. Seems like people are always assuming anybody who's fat is a moron and lying about their food, so I feel horrible publicly talking about having been a little inaccurate and a lot unfair, as if I'm a bad example of the cliche. But I felt it wouldn't be honest of me if I didn't fess up publicly.

***

I've been pretty sick the last few days. And I went back to lowcarb the night of the 18th (the two are not related, except that perhaps the HC/gluten caused a lung infection that ended up in sinuses/everywhere).

In 1.5 days -- between late evening 9/19 and early morning 9/21 -- I lost 13# in water weight. Ye gods. That's nearly 2 gallons! I've had to pee like every 30-90 minutes depending for two days, haven't really slept in two days, every part of my face hurts from sinuses, and I am in general very unhappy physically. But it's an amazing thing to drink nearly a gallon of water a day and yet lose nearly two gallons of body-water in 1.5 days time! The minute I ditched carbs and shifted to "meat", took very little time -- it is interesting that every time I would be in the restroom I could feel my right thigh and FEEL that it was just slightly less bloated than 30-90 minutes before! How amazingly efficient the body is.

Already I don't wake up feeling like I'm "overstuffed-inside" and nearly immobilized. I feel kind of weak and unbalanced but I suspect that's as much about being sick as it is such a drastic sudden weight loss.

When I began LC it was 9/18/06. So my recent re-beginning was on my two year anniversary. For all my griping about it not working consistently and more, the fact is that I have kept 100# off for nearly two years now and lost some more in the meantime. I should credit getting off carbs and gluten for more than I do: even if eating well doesn't always result in anything like the kind of weight loss I had initially (I guess I have been unrealistic...), obviously this has worked for me to some degree and the weight has, in general, STAYED off my body -- that is frankly far more impressive than the weight loss, if you look at the maintenance % of weight loss in our society.

I do seem to have some issue with losing/regaining the last 15# several times over the last 18 months but since I keep sliding off lowcarb, I can hardly blame that on the eating plan.

It's always a cascade failure, and it always starts with insufficient protein. Always. If I get 100+g of protein a day, I stay on plan. When I don't, for 2-3 days running, I end up eating something I shouldn't, or deciding to go out to eat, or whatever. It's so obviously a "feeding behavior" much like we measure in animals it's almost embarrassing, though I think it's good that it's become so clear. At least what keeps me on plan -- or sends me off it -- is pretty evident.

OK, I need to get back to feeling sorry for myself here, or I'll be wasting all this valuable time being sick. (haha)

Manifesting Change

2008-09-13T20:54:00.002-05:00

Somewhere in the big-screen drama of losing well over 100#, the details get lost. Sometimes it seems as if everything in my life has revolved around my extra weight, and on the changes that have come about as a result of losing a good portion of it, and the angst related to not yet losing yet more of it, and so on.

Lately, I've been meditating. Almost daily, via archetype meditations. These are not passive no-mind Zen kind of stuff. Other terms for this include 'conscious dreaming' and 'active imagination' and so forth. They are a skill in their own right, but done correctly they are not only cool, even amazing, but can make radical changes in your reality. They are silly sometimes, but they work.

I've been meditating and praying about my life and I finally got around to meditating on my extra weight. I found it interesting, but the dream that followed was even more impactive. I felt a sense of excitement after that, as if I can feel on some level that I am delving into important things that need "dealing with". I have more to do on it. But suffice to say it is the first internal work I have done on that topic (oddly enough; my boyfriend pointed out that I seemed to be avoiding the one topic I thought was most important--not a coincidence instead of denial, I'm sure!).

A few things have come about just the last two weeks that are such major changes in my life that I feel like I ought to blog about them.

Identity

I am PJ on the internet (and to a few folks offline). I am Palyne in my personal life. There: I am no longer hiding from the world because I'm fat and I'm worried they will know it. I am no longer hiding my internet involvement in one thing because people involved in some other thing might not relate to me so much. You know what? I DON'T CARE ANYMORE. I am not sure how it happened but I truly don't. I don't say that in a defiant or angry way; I say it in a totally accepting way.

Apparently I wasn't really worried about what other people thought: I was worried about what *I* thought. I judged myself harshly. My science-nut persona hates my psychic woo-woo stuff. My fashion-snob persona hates my fat-girl stuff. I've been split into pieces on the internet, separate from my real name, pieces separate from each other, for protection. But now that suddenly my feelings about myself have radically changed and I've started to truly accept myself, my feelings about what others think of me has radically altered too.

The meditation did this. But I can't help but think that the combination of a lot of weight lost, plus the awesome, amazing supportive environment of the wonderful people in the lowcarb world I'm blessed to run into online, has a lot to do with it too.

And you know what I realized? I like myself all the sudden. Yeah sure, I'm really overweight. Who cares besides me? Who matters besides me? I'm working on it, off and on. It'll improve or it won't. It has nothing to do with my quality as a human being. Anybody who thinks it does I am far better off without.

For the first time ever I 'connected' my pieces on the internet. I made a personal blog (at blog.palyne.com) and around weekly I grab posts from all my blogs and suck 'em in there. I linked to all my blogs there. In 13 years online I have never done that. Connected all my pieces plus connected my personal and online identities.

Maybe it seems like a small thing? But I feel as if the iceberg under my surface, the whole thing has shifted. Seriously, "coming out of the closet" about my fat and putting my 'identities' together online, feels as powerful to me as one of my old friend's coming out of the closet (er, literally) felt for him. Like maybe most people would say, "That's who you are, fine," but people "who understand" would realize it's one of the biggest decisions of a life.

***

Today I had the urge to actually deal with 'the curtain issue' in my house. I have 13 windows in my tract home. Aside from two that are so badly done it's embarrassing, the rest range from uncovered, to the charming "fabric duck-taped to the windowframe" in the back room. I suddenly had the profound and powerful feeling that this simply HAD to change. And right now. I had the money. I wasn't buy anything but super walmart--not like really nice stuff or anything--but since I needed brackets, a couple kinds of poles, sheers, curtains, etc. for 13 windows I knew it would add up bigtime and it sure did. But you know what? I feel like this is another fundamental change in me. In 8 years I've lived here, it's like I have only "existed" here. I have barely "claimed it" in a proper way and really gone about making it like what I want.

Last week I bought primer, paint, and all needed items, to paint my bedroom, which is so hideous that 'welfare tenament' is the closest thing to a description. I bought myself a lovely quilt for my birthday (which is tomorrow, 9/14 -- I'm 43!) with pillow shams.

I can't put into words why after 8 years I finally give a damn. Why I'm willing to spend my money on making radical changes in my environment. About 1.5 years ago I did a few months of massive 'clearing out' process. Maybe this is the next phase. All I know is that for the first time in eons I really care about how my house looks and want to proctively work on making it something I love.

***

Today I stopped by the salon. I got a slightly geometric above-shoulders cut (longer in front than back) -- she cut off eight inches (8") -- wow. We bleached out a 2.5 inch swath of hair on the middle right side, then colored 2/3 of it a dark wine-red and 1/3 a lovely gold. I have two solid streaks of vivid color in my hair. Oh yeah, and we left a skinny but pretty tri-color braid (similar to one I had when I was 20) -- my 12 year old was "agog" when she saw me!

It's not that big a deal. But here's the sitch: I have not cared enough about myself, paid enough attention to myself, to do ANYTHING more than chop hair off bluntly in over a dozen years, and only because it was more convenient shorter. There was a time when I cared what I looked like, what I wore, what my hair was like. My hair's always been my sense of humor (and a good thing, since it is thin, fine, more sparse since my weight gain, and does absolutely nothing of interest). But today is the first time that I actually had a feeling of INTEREST IN MYSELF.

This interest in myself; the recent sudden acceptance of myself; my renewed interested in making my environment decent; they all seem connected to me.

I feel like weight loss, nice people to encourage me via internet, and meditation and prayer, have combined to make some really fundamental, profound changes in my psychology. I feel like I am "waking up to myself" on some level.

It's a pretty awesome feeling.

PJ

Things Change. How Low is "Low-Carb"?

2008-09-07T17:24:00.007-05:00

They say that what you learn first, you sometimes learn deepest. It's possible that between The Protein Power Life Plan and the Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution, that the "20-30 carbs" part just stuck in my brain. Like some perennial idea, it has re-appeared annually and bloomed twice a season.

Maybe it's because I started so huge--ok, who am I kidding, I've lost ~150 pounds and I am still huge--but I think maybe I didn't pay so much attention to "the rest" of the lowcarb books when they got into "maintenance."

There is no such thing as maintenance when you need to lose 250+ pounds. The expected end of your 'diet' -- the induction part of the eating plan, designed for maximum weight loss -- is a distant dream, a hypothetical hope far off into the sunset.

Even planning for it is unreasonable. You just dive into induction and figure that "someday, when you are nearer a normal weight," you will "increase" your carbohydrate level. That someday becomes the same fictional date used for daydreams, based on "that mythical time when I look acceptable to others". It doesn't exist on a calendar. It only exists as a figment of my imagination.

***

Eventually there comes a time when things must change. A lot of people who start out "traditionally low-carb" -- basically, the Atkins or Eades plans -- eventually, have to change.

It might be that their weight loss simply slows greatly or even stops. When what you're doing isn't working, obviously, you start looking into doing something else.

It might be that they simply cannot abide eating so restrictively anymore.

It might be that they realize their whole life has obsessively revolved around food thanks to their eating plan and they just can't do that to themselves and their lives and the lives of those they live with anymore.

It might be that they were holding onto that eating plan solely with the iron grip of optimism, which after a long time and still finding themselves "really fat", finally started to falter.

It might be that they've been eating as close to zero-carb as an occasional egg and some spices and alliums make possible, and there is simply no further options in that direction anymore.

Suffice to say that people with a LOT of weight to lose can run into a whole list of problems that people who need to lose a lot less weight seldom do. And when that happens, something has got to change.

***

When you "expand" your eating plan, and you were "very low carb ketogenic diet" to begin with (VLCKD, <30-40/day depending on the person), obviously what that means is that you are going to be eating more carbs.

And since few of us utilize this opportunity to eat 10x as much broccoli and asparagus as we were eating previously, this means adding in new foods.

***

Since I began lowcarb, I had some degree of obsession with details. I got my nutrition counts from labels or USDA. I used numbers to the second decimal--third, if available. I did all my measures based on grams with an electronic scale. If it called for 1 Tbsp, I would weigh that, and then look up the grams in USDA, and either match that so my count was correct, or mathematically evaluate what my precise measure came out to. I tracked everything in my food, down to "a clove of garlic" or "some salt and pepper" which I estimated the counts for based on USDA and always estimated high. I kept detailed spreadsheets of my food down to its smallest ingredient.

Why? You could say, "four planets in Virgo; it's a curse." But the truth is probably more social: I have 17 years now of 'awareness' of how our culture at large considers all fat people to be stupid or liars. They assume that anybody fat is eating bon-bons all day or they wouldn't be fat, and anything said to the contrary either implies they are earnest but in-denial deluded, or lying out of embarrassment. So I think I "overcompensated" out of my offended-ego, trying to be obsessively detailed so that I would not ever feel that I was making one of the "errors or untruths" so many people assume on.

I've changed. I cannot do that anymore. I will not do that anymore.

I don't mind keeping a 'general' tally of what I eat, mostly because by now my eating has evolved to where it's mostly whole foods, or ingredients I put together for something, and it's just not that difficult to track even in my head. But I will no longer pursue an obsessive sub-decimal detail about my food intake. I'm not even sure I'm willing to pursue a physical list. I am SICK of it.

Do you know how obsessed you have to be in order to pull that off? How much your focus has to continually be upon food? How careful and/or the chore that even the smallest quick-food -- say, a homemade hamburger patty -- can become? It's ridiculous. I don't want to do that with my life anymore. It has taken over my life when I implement it. I become less a person who happens to be on an eating plan, than a walking eating plan who on rare occasion also focuses on being a person. I just won't do it anymore. I am fed up, put out, done with obsessing on details.

I feel that somewhere, sometime, people are going to look at me and think, "She doesn't even pay that much attention to her food, no wonder she is fat!" But I have paid attention to my food in serious anal-retentive detail and frankly, I haven't really seen that this level of attention to detail makes much difference. I seriously doubt that my calculating the carbs and calories in my garlic and spices, my calculating to a tenth of a calorie when measuring the bell pepper in my salad, really makes any difference. Maybe if I were using calories and trying to lose 3 pounds it would. But not right now.

Because it appears that my body is either willing to lose weight, and will do so with any fairly decent eating plan, or it is not willing to lose weight, and no amount of obsession changes that.

I swear weight loss is starting to seem more like magic, or maybe something in my head, than nutrition.

***

Apparently I need more than 30-40 carbs a day; but I need less than say, 150 carbs a day. But there are other considerations. For example, calories are not much of an issue when low-carb. But if you're eating a good number of carbs, they become an issue. And eating high-fat is just fine if your carbs are low. But if your carbs are high, eating high-fat as well is not so good; the combination will gradually kill you. So it goes without saying that if I'm going to be eating an adequate protein (for MY size) and relatively high-fat (meat-egg-cheese) diet, that I can't be eating a lot of carbs. I still need to be "low-carb".

How low is low-carb?

There is no hard set definition for 'low-carb'.

If we used research as an example, we'd have to be using the criteria of a bunch of well educated but on sad occasion, not very bright people who have been doing poor research with carefully crafted pre-determined results for a long time. Their version of 'high-fat' or 'low-carb' are numbers that sometimes defy belief. Or, still trying to be 'official', we could use the ADA definition:

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) recommends that approximately 50 percent to 60 percent of total daily calorie intake should be in the form of carbohydrates.

Let's see. If I'm trying (and usually failing to achieve this many, but it's my goal) to eat 2300 calories a day, half that is 1150, and a carb has "approximately" 4 calories each, that means according to the ADA I should be eating around 287-345 carbs per day. OK, that will kill me, but first it'll make me vastly fatter than I already am, so I have to disregard that measure as well.

No wonder diabetes is considered 'degenerative' and so many 'pre-diabetic' people end up with it, following advice like this? Perhaps that number is not accurate. I searched the ADA website for something specific. What a labrinth of non-specifics on nutrition counts! I did find this, regarding the ADA's food pyramid, with its primary base of carbohydrates:

At the base of the pyramid are bread, cereal, rice, and pasta. These foods contain mostly carbohydrates. The foods in this group are made mostly of grains, such as wheat, rye, and oats. Starchy vegetables like potatoes, peas, and corn also belong to this group, along with dry beans such as black eyed peas and pinto beans. [...] Choose 6-11 servings per day.

Well, all I know is, "That's too many carbs for my body" no matter how I count it. Given I ate high-carb my entire life, I know the only thing that does really well is make me insanely fat. So I am left using the more modern parlance or "lingo" used by "many" people in commercial books and the internet. Which, of course, varies.

The "average diet" is allegedly in the 275-375 carbs per day range.

Generally, 70-150 carbs a day is considered a "controlled" carbohydrate diet.

Generally, 35-80 carbs a day is considered "low" carb.

Generally, <35 carbs a day is considered "very low carb ketogenic".

Obviously these exact numbers are going to vary depending on who you ask. This is an 'average range'.

So what most people think of as 'LowCarb' is actually the far extreme of the measure. It isn't 'low' carb, it is VERY low carb, specifically so low that it sponsors the body into a ketogenic state. This is the "induction" part of most lowcarb plans.

Of course, most plans are designed for a brief induction, followed by a raise in carbs, eventually raising to a "maintenance" level, which is another big variable number that depends on the individual.

***

There is a very big difference in your food when you are eating 30 carbs versus 80 carbs. REALLY big. Condiments, sauces, herbs, become almost a non-issue (as long as we aren't talking about flour-sauce/gravies or desserts of course). You can actually eat fruit (wonderful), and carbier veggies (yum, peas!), more dairy, and even small amounts of things like whole oats and beans.

But there is a big difference in your body too, and that difference is ketosis. Ketosis is unlikely to be in place when you are eating 70 carbs a day, and it's nearly impossible to avoid (at least cyclically) if you are supersized and eating <40 carbs a day.

When ketosis makes fat fall off you, it's great. But when it ceases to cause your fat to disappear at a good clip, then its value is questionable. That was, after all, the whole point of invoking that state in the body in the first place. Why else? I never heard that ketosis was good for much of anything besides the weight loss side of it.

If eating ketogenic-level carbs no longer causes a person to lose weight at any reasonable speed, then you have to wonder if eating more nutrients in a wider array of food, with more carbs (but not "a ton" of them), might not be healthier. Or at the least, more easily maintained and more emotionally satisfying for the variety.

***

I don't yet have a decision or plan of action.

I do however have a few things I DO know:

I am not obsessing-in-detail about my food anymore. I just refuse.

I am not considering 'lowcarb' to be <30g anymore. If up to 100 does not make me gain significant weight or have any blood sugar or other problems, then I am going to expand my food as much as possible and eat what I can. If eating far less isn't making me lose weight and isn't noticeably improving any other health measure, then I fail to see what difference it makes anyway.

So... things change. This is not where I began. This is not what I considered "low-carb" when I began. This is a whole different approach in several ways.

But I tried the other way, the ketogenic VLC. And it worked great!--until it didn't.

So... now, as soon as I figure out what I can personally sustain, I'm going to try something else.

PJ

Fat Forever?

2008-09-04T21:34:00.008-05:00

You know, things in the lowcarb and weightloss categories have been coming up with me, that I haven't known how to blog about. In part because they are not those happy-joy encouraging, positive things. And in part because I don't really have an answer to anything, I'm just speculating. Let me go ahead and speculate on-blog-paper. Maybe other people have thought about similar issues. Feel welcome to comment because I'd really like other peoples' input on this difficult subject.

I have observed the last few months that I can eat really well, and I'm not losing weight. Or when I do, it's a very small amount over a rather long period of time. I can eat badly, and gain water weight, or actually lose weight on the scale, which is unintuitive, seems quite unfair, is even maddening. Long-term, yes, eating too many carbs drives my weight up, through the water/glycol storage if nothing else. But short term, it often drops the weight several pounds. Maybe because less protein means degraded LBM? God only knows. I can only tell you that the scale does not seem to adequately reflect my eating behavior in the short term. This is the case for other people I know who are about the same size as me, coming from a similar high weight as me.

And for the long term, eating badly will see the numbers rise, but eating well is not seeing them fall. Low calorie. High calorie. Moderate calorie. Low carb. High carb. Moderate carb. Vegetables. No vegetables. High fat. Low fat. With Gluten. Without it. With dairy. Without it. I admit I have not obsessively pursued every one of these, but there should be some vicarious experience here: I have friends online who have pursued many things I haven't, are about the same size with the same history, and facing the same issues.

Now, as a friend recently pointed out, lowcarb has its own near-religious devotion. People will insist that since lowcarb is The Answer™, surely you must be doing something "wrong". You must be having too many carbs... too many calories... you should be doing Intermittant Fasting (IF)... you should be doing High-Fat... you should be doing Low-Fat... you should be adding in Coconut Oil... you should be avoiding dairy... the list goes on.

When I see someone suggest that gosh, maybe "carbs are creeping," I swear I want to punch them in the head. What kind of arrogant denial-of-my-reality crap is that? Put this in the category of "you're fat so you must be retarded." YES it's one of MANY possibilities for people not paying attention, but if I were not paying attention to what the hell I was eating, why would I be complaining that I'm living on X or Z and not losing weight? Or not at any speed that verges on 'reasonable' given the levels of restriction on food intake?

I think this is denying reality. The reality is that there is not much research on morbidly obese people who lose weight via lowcarb. We don't actually KNOW what is "supposed" to happen, what can, what should, what will, or what factors might affect bodies with this history much moreso than bodies which have had "lesser degrees" of it.

It is entirely possible that peoples' bodies vary in terms of what amount of weight they are willing to lose -- or at what rate, with what 'rest for homeostasis' periods in between -- just like metabolism varies. And it is entirely possible that when you start out 500 pounds, you are never going to be thin. BUT: most of us already accept this. "Maybe I'll never be thin again," but most of us do NOT accept that the weight we WILL be, will be 350 pounds. I mean that sounds completely unreasonable right? How could that possibly be a 'proper' weight?

Surely if you just did X, or Y, or Z, the weight would come off until some number we "like better" arrives, e.g., ok maybe you'll never be thin but you might be 30-40 lbs above your ideal weight. What if that is Just. Not. True. ?? What if the body EVER getting to 500# means that it is going to willingly go to around 350-380 and then "sit there" in homeostasis for eons, no matter WHAT you do, and then gradually get a LITTLE bit lower later? What if 300# is your 'thin weight'?

My point is, nobody knows! We act like it's a known, but it's not. There just isn't really research on this stuff. Most the people who've lost "a lot" of weight have lost like 100-150#. We know people can do this and at the end of that be a 'reasonable' weight, but they still have a lot of issues related to their former obesity, from vastly lower metabolism, lower leptin levels, higher hunger compared to people the same weight, need to eat fewer calories to stay the same weight as other people who didn't used to be fat, and so on.

Well, me and friends have lost that much weight, but some of us at the other end of that are still fat. And the 'additional' weight, unlike the first 100-150 lbs, is simply not coming off in any mathematically reasonable way. Not that any of it is mathematically reasonable--because metabolism is chemistry, not math--but it's really quite unreasonable according to our belief systems.

In a previous blog post I quoted Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University. Here's a couple of 'reminder' quotes:

So let me put a finer point on this. Imagine you’re 250 pounds. and you lose 100 lbs. to 150 lbs. Now you ask how many calories does that person burn compared to someone who started out at 150 pounds.They burn like 300 or 400 calories fewer per day when they’re at that reduced weight. Now think about it. That person is hungry and now can only eat fewer calories than the equal weight person to maintain that weight, despite the fact that they weigh the same amount.

Another:

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman (regarding post-weight loss surgery): …there’s another feature of this surgery that people, I think, ignore, and it’s this: when you do this procedure you limit the intake of a person to about 700 calories a day. Just so you know, none of you could consume 700 calories a day for very long; it is a very small number of calories. Despite that fact, these people still end up being clinically obese at the other end of the procedure. They lose a lot of weight but they would still on average be definable as significantly obese on average after the procedure.

Now think about it, they’re eating 700 calories a day and they’re still obese. I mean if that doesn’t say that there’s something metabolically different about the obese than the lean, I don’t know what does.

Maybe the reality is that I need to live on green veggies and meat and nothing else for about 3 months, for every 1-5 lbs of weight I want to lose. Maybe this is just the way it is. Do I want to lose 1-5 lbs? Sure. Do I think that losing 12-60# in a year would still be worth it? I sure do. Do I think that I can live on an insanely restrictive eating plan for the next several years in the hope that I might someday, and this even assumes the current trend doesn't get worse, I might someday get somewhere NEAR a normal weight? Or maybe only get 100# lower, which would be awesome, but I'd still be morbidly obese?

I'm not sure. In all honesty, I am not sure. I am sure that I can eat generally low-carb -- if we consider ~100 or less carbs a day to be lowcarb, no problem. I can eat gluten-free, that's a bigger problem but do-able. I can avoid junkfood, processed foods, for the most part, that's not that big a deal. But I am not sure that I can avoid every molecule of less than perfect food forever while "waiting for" my body to decide to lose a little more weight.

It is ticking me off that when I eat well, the scale isn't really moving. One reason is because some people look at me as an example, since I'm a blogger so in public. They might be obese too, and see my success so far with weight loss as inspiration. So what the hell do I say now? Why have I stayed in the 350-380 zone (varying) for so long? Why does eating well not seem to drop my weight? When I began lowcarb, even accounting for water/glycol loss, merely keeping my carbs fairly low resulted in super rapid weight loss. Now it seems like very little works to bring about weight loss at ANY speed let alone 'rapidly'.

Now as a caveat to all this I will make one admission: I have not eaten, for "the long term" (meaning a solid 40+ days), according to the "nutritionally complete" eating plan that Regina Wilshire would recommend. In other words I have not gone greatly out of my way to get every vitamin and mineral and nutrient that the body probably thinks it needs, as part of my eating plan. It IS possible that the body is refusing to lose weight that it might agree to, with a more nutritionally complete eating plan.

So far, I have simply been incompetent on this issue. My eating habits have changed so radically the last two years it's absolutely amazing. I eat better than most of planet earth, most of the time anyway. I am on the verge of being a 'whole foods' person (not raw, not vegetarian, but not processed either), with a couple of condiment/sauce exceptions. I eat fewer carbs AND calories than people 1/3 my size. I don't lose weight.

If I up my calories and make SURE I am getting at least 2000 per day, I may lose weight verrrrrrrrry slowly. If I up my protein, I can stay with that. If my protein is not at least 100+g per day, I will eventually be driven by biology to eat higher carbs because my body isn't getting enough protein/amino. So that makes eating ~120g protein/2000cal per day absolutely required. Yet even when I succeed at that (I chronically fall short; I seldom go over--it's just not easy to eat that much protein and still be high-calorie frankly), the weight loss is amazingly slow.

Some bodybuilders think that you cannot deprive your body of more than 300-500 calories MAX a day from whatever your BMR--and it might vary per day and depending on nutrients--and lose weight. They think if you go below that number your body shifts into starvation mode instead of weight loss. The exception being some very obese people and only initially. This would suggest that the only way to lose 'additional' per-day would be to add weightlifting, so the body was reducing insulin resistance, and adding lean muscle mass. Of course when you are body building you generally need to add a few more carbs and calories for other reasons.

But I will admit, that along with Regina's nutrient-dense approach, weightlifting with calorie observation has not been something I have seriously done for 40+ days in order to carefully measure the results.

So I haven't tried 'everything'. Maybe this means I have no right to complain.

But you know what--I'm not alone. Lots of people I know are in a similar situation to me. Some are much smaller. Some larger. All have tried a LOT of different options food-wise. And the fact seems to be that eating plan alone, AFTER a certain amount of weight loss, is simply not the 'solution' to obesity.

Maybe it requires hard core nutrition too. Maybe it requires weight lifting too. Maybe it requires prayer and work on 'belief systems'. Who knows.

I only know that what I have been doing IS NOT WORKING.

So until I get to the point of doing one of the two things I have not yet successfully maintained for any length of time, I feel like I have no real point to blogging about progress.

I feel guilty for not losing weight more rapidly. Like I am letting down people who are watching me. Like people might suspect I'm lying about something. Like it might make lowcarb, which I genuinely believe in particularly for my body, look bad.

What I don't know is if maybe I'm wasting my time. Maybe my body is always going to be enormous. Maybe if we had research it would say, "You screwed it up, it is never getting much better." If I knew that, at least I wouldn't feel so guilty about it!

PJ

The Bizarre Shapes of the Body

2008-08-12T18:31:00.003-05:00

One thing is certain: if my life wasn't weird enough already, my body is now contributing to the mix. Thanks to lowcarb my body is smaller than it used to be. This is having some unintended, and sometimes disturbing, side effects.

It's kind of like Frankenstein, or The Bride, where you realize that your body is kind of horrible looking but you are stuck with it. And I say this in the nicest way, because I love my body, as a nature spirit symbiote with me; I spend a lot of time lately being truly 'in' it and 'with' it and letting it know how awesome I think it is. But still, watching it morph as I slowly shrink is just... weird.

Psychologically, I mean.

It used to be that I was simply huge. No detail, really; "huge" summed it all up. At 500# you are simply too large to have much of any definition; you're a round refrigerator for the most part.

At the moment I'm hovering around 357. I say 'hovering' because it varies and I think is refusing to go 7 pounds lower out of some perverse desire to delay my meeting my first major weight loss goal for a few more eons.

Currently, my weight is not dropping at any decent speed, which I expect is mostly because I am not really "dieting" anymore but simply eating in a way that is generally lowcarb and mostly gluten free. Despite this, my body continues to... change shape.

I don't know if it is losing fat despite not losing weight, or if it is simply my body's "redistribution of the wealth" so to speak.

The first change was when I stopped, in fear, getting into the shower, realizing I had something oddly hard under the surface on my side. I felt around it in horror. A gigantic, sort of flattened cyst? A tumor of some kind?

Then I realized... those were ribs.

... yes. It had been that long since I'd felt them.

A variety of small changes happened. And then one day in the bathroom at the movie theatre, I realized that my butt had changed. Now, since I carry the vast majority of my weight in the pear shape -- my face only slightly looks fat depending on the picture, my upper body does but not nearly as overwhelmingly as my lower body -- for the most part, the region hereinafter referred to as the "lowertummyhipbuttthigh" region was, for lack of a better term, just a gigantic blob.

But my stomach has lost a lot of fat (I have a waist, unlike most people my size, as I don't store much fat there the way some do). With a lot of extra skin there, the fat sort of hangs down in a roll very low. And then it turned out that my hips and lower butt lost a lot of fat as well, and much of the fat in that region then started sort of hanging down around the top-middle of that area.

This resulted in me standing in front of the mirror, turned to the side, looking and poking in awe at the new weird shape my body had taken. Now there is obviously a huge lump/roll of fat that is basically the lower stomach and then travels all the way around the back. So the top-half of the butt is superfat, with a funky bulge out to each side.

Rolls and bulges were less an issue when my whole body was one big bulge. You know, nobody thinks about the pillsbury doughboy having cellulite, cause he's fat enough to just be "soft and big". But if he started losing weight you could bet he'd start looking pretty funky. ;-)

Recently I apparently started losing some of the fat on my thighs. Well, maybe not losing, maybe it is just moving elsewhere, who knows. In any case, my thighs which were a semi-solid shape from hip to knee -- just very, very large -- are now oddly creased in the middle and to a lesser degree 'here and there', with bulges and a sort of hanging in places that makes clear some of that dreaded "extra skin" of the superfat-dieter is starting to become more apparent now.

With every pound I get lighter, I get one more pound more deformed.

I am trying not to let this freak me out.

I'm not alone. My online buddy Niki has publicly grieved about this too. And I bet everybody who has lost a significant amount of weight has had some of that.

But it's hard to express the sort of horror that comes of watching your body take the most bizarre new shapes, watching your extra skin start to sag, all that fat hanging around in it in very strange, new ways -- when your primary goal is to look better and feel better.

I grant that I feel better. I grant that I can now fit in most chairs and booths (though it's a squeeze in some), and that I can do many physical things I couldn't before, and wear a 5x pants which means I can actually wear pants, unlike the former 8x+ size that does not exist. I am so much happier. I think I might actually live. And I have nothing but good to say for my shift toward eating "real food", which as a side effect is teaching me to cook.

But it is a curious sadness, to know that the more weight you lose, the uglier your body gets. It makes the whole weight-loss process sort of . . . bittersweet.

PJ

The Return of Real Food (+ Almond Muffins)

2008-06-29T20:18:00.007-05:00

I realized with a big shock today that every single food that I will be eating in the coming week was something I would not have eaten a few years ago.

Every. Single. Item.

Because they're weird? Because they're lowcarb?

No. Because they're REAL!

*

I was going through a "loosely" planned menu, so I'd know what to defrost, and basing it on what food I have since I can't shop till near next weekend. I eat a lot of the same things each day (eg usually a blueberry and plain yogurt smoothie for breakfast, and eggs, sometimes with sausage if I have it, as a second late-morning meal...) so it wasn't rocket science.

I'm gradually getting my kitchen organized so really, I pretty much always have the same foods available. I can glance at the pantry and see right off what I have few or none of. I can plan a menu without worrying about what I have (normally) because I always have about the same stuff. I can estimate costs because I buy the same stuff all the time.

Most people eat the same things pretty repetitively. I find that I do this naturally. Having menus actually helps me plan some variety, which I consider healthy, and use a little of everything. My produce varies because that has such a short shelf life. Most everything else lasts longer, or if it can be stored or frozen, a very long time.

I think food can be broken down into the following major categories (I'm probably missing something!). This is a list of what I eat/want to eat, and expect to have on hand whenever I can.

Animal Proteins
> eggs-chicken, eggs-duck, chicken-whole, chicken-breasts, chicken-thighs; turkey-whole, turkey-breast, turkey-ground; beef-roast, beef-steaks, beef-ground; pork-loin, pork-tenderloin, pork-cutlets; sausage-italian hot, sausage-breakfast hot, sausage-gourmet jalapeno-jack; bacon-ordinary

Vegetables
> asparagus, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, sweet peppers, hot peppers, zucchini

Roots
> carrots

Fruits
> small organic gala apples, avocados, strawberries, frozen wild blueberry, raspberry, blackberry, tomato

Alliums and Other
> garlic, onions, scallions, mushrooms

Nuts
> pecans

Seeds
> almonds, flax, coconut

Dairy
> cream, cream cheese, sour cream, colby-jack, mozzarella, parmesan, blue

Legumes
> black beans, small red beans

Tubers
> sweet potato

Processed foods

> coffee, cocoa
> seasonings (from extracts to mixed spices to GF soy sauce, condiments)
> sauces (4-cheese alfredo sauce, enchilada sauce, etc.)
> drinks (diet A&W root beer)
> artificial sweeteners (generally sucralose)

*

Back in the days when I worked ALL the time, and honestly thought Subway sandwiches were healthy (healthy enough to combat the bread, Dr. Pepper and Doritos and cookies??), I never ate real food. If I had anything at all at home, it was generally tortillas and bread and bagels and pasta.

My food life has changed so much it's hard to measure.

Last night I made almond muffins. I've seen recipes for this kind of thing in various places but I got this one from my LC buddy Karen.

Almond Muffins
2 cups almond meal
4 eggs
2 tsp baking powder
4 oz (1/2 cup or 1 cube) butter (you can use coconut oil)
1/3 cup sweetener (davinci works well)
pinch salt
Mix the dry stuff, stir in wet stuff, stir very well, bake in 12 muffin tins @ 350 about 15 minutes.
Nutrition counts are here.
You can add extracts, berries, etc. to this for a stronger flavor.

Despite some artificial sweetener, even this yummy "baked good" (and the texture is closer to breadish than most LC stuff) is healthier than the stuff I used to eat and seriously considered healthy.

When I list my foods like above, where the stuff I want least is near the bottom -- I'm working on getting more at the top and less at the bottom -- it really brings home how NOT REAL my eating was prior to lowcarb. There was a day I could not have even imagined eating so much 'real food' -- let alone actually cooking it myself, heh!

I feel so fortunate that I've come to this eating plan. My life is so much better in so many ways. It's almost like finding religion. But I guess the body is so profoundly affected by nutrition that makes sense.

Food is the religious doctrine of the body. You can make it bad or good, but you live with what you focus on.

PJ

What's so hard about low-carb?

2008-06-17T12:22:00.004-05:00

Today I was looking at a sample diabetes association daily menu.

I was aghast. I know enough about my body to know that if I were trying to eat that, I would be starving, cold, miserable, obsessed with food, and probably either binging every few days or eventually just giving up altogether.

Lowcarb could save their life. It isn't recommended because apparently the authorities think lowcarb is just so totally impossible nobody could eat like that.

I think the most complicating factor is that there are 1.7 billion items in the grocery store that will kill you, and 200 that won't, 3/4 of which people have never eaten in their life. The situation's worse in restaurants. But that has nothing to do with the eating plan. That's environment. The environment in the home, people can manage.

*

When I first started lowcarb, I joked that it was "like trying to be Amish in New York City." It was HARD. I was constantly faced with the seeming impossibility of getting food together and dealing with eating out somewhere and cooking all-the-freakin-time and so on. I did it, I lost weight, but it was a major pain in the ass.

Now lately, I've been doing fine on LC, imperfect but acceptable, losing weight, as has my kid. And I'm realizing: why was this hard?

What was so complicated about it previously, that it seemed hard?

*

I think some was a mental issue. That is, having grown up where endless varieties of crap were all expected to be put in your body for the fun of it, I had a fundamental misunderstanding of one key thing, which is this:

Food = Meat.
Veggies and fruits are nice treats, except if your meat variety is limited (you don't eat organs, 9 kinds of meat, etc.) they are necessary to add in.

Once I got my head around that, and "animal-based protein" became my priority and vastly dominant food source, a whole lot of everything straightened out on its own.

This doesn't mean that I can't make coconut popovers or flax cocoa muffins or almond cookies or lowcarb pizza or whatever. It just means that everything which is not the primary bodily need is something 'extra'. It isn't really in the category of 'food' except maybe by some percentage of it.

*

I think some was a physical issue.

It is stunning how radically my desire to eat--and WHAT I desire to eat--changes depending on my food intake.

If I eat sufficient protein, veg/fruit and supplements, I pretty much lose most of my cravings for anything else. I don't even think about food except when it's time to eat. And I eat until I'm full and that's fine. And it's a miracle if I can even get as MANY carbs and calories as I'm trying for in my day. I can stand right next to chocolate, cheesecake, pasta, and literally not care. I don't have any desire to eat them.

When I find myself "kinda wanting" things that aren't my basic foods, I know that I haven't had enough protein or fresh foods or supplements or something.

*

I think some was a habit issue.

I buy decent quantities of chicken and ground beef or roast and I cook it all at once in the crockpot or oven usually. On occasion I'll chunk up chicken and bake it with a sauce, or throw the chunks in my wok, or coat 'em with parmesan-herbs and bake, but usually I just cook it all at once. Then I drop it in the freezer or fridge. I can nuke it when I want food, I can mix it in with other foods, whatever. Now that I've started having some decent amounts of things in my freezer, often in serving-size plastic bowls, the stress about 'not having food' has dimmed a great deal.

It used to seem like a nightmare, the planning and shopping and cooking and cleaning. Now I buy mostly the same things, which takes out most of planning and simplifies shopping, I cook more seldom for 'full meals', which simplifies cleaning, too.

*

I think some was a cultural issue.

I grew up with the idea that a meal had several different components to it. You were supposed to have a little meat, a couple of side dishes, a drink, dessert. Except for much of my adult life, the meat took a hike or was barely-there in the midst of pasta or something.

I grew up with the idea that you ate three times a day. As I got older, I ate one time a day. Now I've completely ditched that mentality. Now:

* I have usually dairy+berries for meal 1, like a smoothie.
{1/2cup plain yogurt, 1/3cup cream, 1 egg, 6 ice cubes, 1/3 cup frozen wild blueberries or half a dozen frozen whole strawberries, vanilla, cinnamon, sweetzfree, blendered}

* I have eggs, usually with sausage, and hopefully a tiny bit of veggie, for meal 2.
{3 eggs and 2oz sausage, or 4 eggs 1oz sausage, or 3 eggs, 1oz meat, 1oz cheese, and part of a bell pepper}

* I may not have a meal 3 but if I do, it might be a bowl muffin, or a meat-centered leftover, nuked. It is usually very small (>2oz protein). It may include beans (some of the higher-fiber (lower ECC) beans) or peas, but not a lot.

* For meal 4 I have meat. Lots of it. Like 9-12oz depending on the meat and other meals of that day. It sometimes has a bit of veggie as part of it, in a stew or alongside (like bell peppers and broccoli in stir fry). Or not. Often it's just plain meat. I often make a quick little sauce of some kind for the kid for dipping.

* I may not have a meal 5 but if I do, it might be a tiny gala apple and a few slices of cheese. I only have this if I began eating early and there's at least 2+ hours before sleeping time.

* I take supplements (finally!), and I recently added a 5,000iu of Vitamin D3 from the Drs. Eades's site (proteinpower.com) which I kid you not, within about 6 hours or so greatly improved my "sense of well-being." I think it's made a big difference. I use a potassium salt substitute to make sure I'm not getting too much sodium (I use sauces from jars/cans sometimes) and that I'm getting enough potassium. I drink diet soda, and then guilt (and zits) cure me and I drink only water for awhile, until I forget why I was doing that and go back to diet soda. ;-)

In the end I have about 20-26oz of animal-based protein a day (varies slightly), not enough veggies but some, a little fruit, a little too much dairy but not too extreme, sometimes a bit of legumes (beans or peas) and some supplements.

I'm losing weight on and the important thing is: I feel really good.

I'm deliberately eating more carbohydrates than I used to, but none of it's junk, and none is a ton at once. My highest carb intake is my morning smoothie, except the occasion when I have a meat stew that contains some beans.

I don't feel the way I do in a hard ketosis. I'd be losing weight faster if I were there, but my diet would be a lot more limited.

I don't feel the way I do when I'm eating tons of carbs (like hell).

I actually feel as if for the first time in my life since I can remember, I must be eating in a way that my body is pretty happy with.

*

And it isn't rocket science.

So what I can't figure out is, up until now, why has it been so complicated?

PJ

Kitchen Metaphysics

2008-06-05T00:01:00.011-05:00

If life is but a dream, as the sages say, then everything around us reflects us in some way.

And if the universe is holographic, as the sages and some physicists now suggest, then every reflected item or issue on one level, is probably present in myriad others.

It's not merely as above, so below; it's also as within, so without; and as here, so there; and every other possible permutation.

Most of the best advice in both practical and metaphysical terms, starts there.

While I wouldn't take this to the extreme--I'm not obsessing over the deeper meaning in a hangnail--I do think that observing 'the patterns of our reality', so to speak, can be enlightening. It's like an intro-spective activity using the extro-spective canvas. (Yes. I just made that word up.)

I'm the analogy-queen; I can see nearly anything as a dream-symbol, and correlate it to other things in my mind, heart, spirit, or other facets of experience. It doesn't really matter how objectively valid this might be, as I figure anything from 'subconscious intuition' to 'God/guides' can use this process to help me a little from the inside, even were it nothing more than my colorful imagination.

*

Today I started to make dinner (taco salad: kid-approved). I couldn't help but notice, as I searched for something, that yet again my pitiful old fridge was so overstuffed it was ridiculous. Welcome to lowcarb, where nearly everything is perishable!

This is its normal state, mind you. I sometimes think I compost more food than I eat, mostly because stuff gets buried very easily, unseen, and then gets out of date, or replaced because I think I'm out of it. But as inflation around me seems to make the cost of eating, driving, and heating/cooling my house a lot harder than it used to be, the waste of that becomes a bigger deal.

So, like a cat that stops mid-step to lick a foot in desperate need apparently, I stopped in the middle of making dinner and cleaned out the fridge. REALLY well.

In the back of every shelf, and in the door, were innumerable jars and bottles of stuff. Pickles, pickled stuff, dressings, sauces, jams, you name it. Most of them probably date from a long time ago; although I clean the fridge now and then I usually don't bug that kind of thing, thinking it's still probably good. Most of them are also high-carb. I got rid of all of them like that.

I found a number of things important to me -- a whole chicken, two long tubes of ground sausage, several cheeses -- that were outdated or seriously molded and made me really mad at myself for forgetting they were in there and letting them get buried before I used them. (I thought I'd put the chicken in my chest freezer in the garage.) I got rid of everything outdated.

I nearly threw out a tub of yogurt that smelled like sour cream, despite only expiring two days ago, until I realized it WAS sour cream. I swear, I'm like I Love Lucy in the kitchen!

I had five, 13-gallon trash bags filled with stuff when I was done. I honestly cannot believe there was that much stuff. That's not totally filled, mind you. I just made them as heavy as they could be without splitting; a couple were only half-full, as jars of stuff are heavy. By the time I was done, there was almost nothing left in my fridge. But what was left was well organized and in-date and low-carb.

I recently cleaned out and organized my freezer too (it's a side-by-side), so I felt pretty good about this being done.

I closed the fridge, sat back on a folding chair I'd been using for the job, and considered my kitchen.

*

I have incredibly little counter space. Not counting one fairly unusable (because it's sorta unreachable) corner, I have about 2', ~5', 2' (three separate counter areas). These have to hold my canisters and other things that sit on counters, coffeepot, all my non-refrigerated bottles of stuff (vinegar, etc.), dish drainer, and dirty dishes (I don't have a dishwasher), and so on. So by the time we're talking about useable counter space, there isn't much. There's enough to make a meal just fine, except if I don't clean everything up really well, or I take up a couple feet with dishes needing washed, the next meal has no place to do anything. I mourn this regularly.

Idly looking around, I realized (I knew this, but suddenly realized this in a new way somehow), that I have, count them, three substantial, nice looking sets of clear canisters. (Lovely cubic thick glass ones, spherical lucite ones, and plastic lock&locks.) Every counter in my kitchen is missing the back 8" as a result.

I considered them anew. Most their contents date from--I am not kidding--the year 2000. Think it might be time to get rid of that stuff eh! If I haven't used it by now, I'm definitely not going to be using it anytime soon--and being 8 years old, I don't think I want to use it, airtight canisters or not.

I considered various strategies to consolidate anything useful from the newer l&l's and spice shelf into the prettiest glass ones, use the l&l's for leftover/ freezer storage, and do something elsewhere with the lucite ones. This one step alone would buy me several feet of 8" back-of-counter space freed up.

Then I considered that on the small counter next to the fridge, half of the 2' space is taken up with bottles of stuff -- oils, soy sauce, vinegar, etc. It took me awhile to get the niggling in the back of my head up to the front, where it pointed out that (a) I haven't used more than a few of these bottles in at least two years, (b) nearly everything there is either highcarb, bad for me (like veg oils), or possibly should have been refrigerated anyway, and (c) was another perfect example, like my fridge, of (1) good stuff getting lost in the shuffle, and (2) me using valuable space in my life to store crap I don't use, don't want, and don't care about. This would free up not only the other foot of that counter, but that newly combined space would be a space big enough to actually work in for something like a mixing bowl or chopping mat.

I thought, so really, here I am sorta chronically sad about how pitiful my situation with counter space is, and yet, there is a solution in several areas, and it's really my own fault the situation IS what it IS: if I simply arranged things differently, the situation would be a whole lot better.

It was sort of disconcerting to think I've been bitching about having no counter space for years, and yet, I seem to have pointedly made the problem worse. And somehow, didn't notice.

Like I sort-of-observed, but didn't become "fully" aware of in a deep way, my obesity for so long.

In an upper cupboard on the second shelf I have glasses I can barely reach. Over on another cupboard the second shelf is filled with pyrex baking pans that somehow didn't make it over to the hanging pot rack shelf and take up space I wish I had for other stuff. And the most reachable lower-top cupboard is filled with cups--most of them too small to be useful, typical coffee cups, most of them cheap and cheesy, mismatched stuff I'm not even sure where I got. Why can't I just buy a 6-set of nice, good-sized mugs? Why have a cupboard totally over-filled with ugly crap that's too small?

As my boyfriend pointed out, based on organizing his own kitchen, having tons of cheap dishes does little but crowd the good ones and allow you to make such a mess of your kitchen before you have to break down and clean it that it becomes monumental.

Under the first tiny counter there is a 'corner' cupboard. I don't drop & kneel as easily as the average person, so I only use the front; it's hard to see let alone reach anything farther back. It was looking kinda frenzied. There's probably 150 cheap storage-container lids there... and no containers. My weekly housekeeping help seems to throw them away, unless pixies are stealing them in the night. I've told her she can do that if something is really gross. Apparently many things fit this description. Given my refrigerator, I realize she probably has a point.

I looked closer into the murky depths and realized I have 3 nested metal mixing bowls in there. I forgot those even existed! And I really could have used them recently. It occurred to me all the crappy stuff I can't use is front and center, and useful things are out of sight, out of mind.

I wondered if that was some analogy to my life. Like how all the trivial crap takes up my daily time, while the fairly important stuff, like prayer, meditation, music, writing, working out, etc. get shoved to the back of my life and forgotten in the shuffle.

*

I looked at this white wall-unit (bookshelf) I have in the kitchen. It's the most handy, accessible thing in the whole little square kitchen. It's filled with (white) appliances. Which, when organized, looks kinda neat. But as I eyed it critically, it occurred to me nearly everything on it I almost never use. A couple I've never used, like the ice cream maker and extra bowl, or the belgian waffle iron. The yogurt maker I used twice. The dehydrator, never yet though I hope so still. The big popcorn maker I can't use now that I'm LC but don't want to get rid of (yet).

I looked closer and saw that the MP3/CD/Radio I've been looking for going on two months now, was actually stacked/ buried underneath a regular-sized waffle iron on the bottom shelf. And as I sat there looking at it with "new" eyes, I realized that while things I need (like glasses) are hard to reach, stuff I almost never use sits in the most prime real estate of the room.

Again, I surrounded myself with what I didn't need, while pushing what I did need back to inconvenience.

The impact of my whole kitchen hit me. I thought: It hasn't changed much in two years. Why am I just now noticing that it is not structured to support me?

I saw that in some respects, this is an analogy to what I was just blogging about: I have seen it, I have been consciously aware of it, but as my boyfriend pointed out, I hadn't "seen the forest for the trees": the larger pattern and its import hadn't hit me until just now.

*

He and I were talking about something the other night and this really fits into it. Sometimes, it's like each individual little thing seems like no big deal. Inconveniences with my coffeemaker and my knife block and other things, I just deal with, because they are such trivia, so what. Tons of things. But none are important. None are a big deal.

And yet when you combine all those trivia into one situation, you get this BIG situational pattern that is amazing and eventually, when you realize the scope of it, you have to admit it's untenable: you can't stand it anymore. You realize the situation is now "ridiculous" and "overwhelming" and frankly dysfunctional and things have got to change.

Things that are fine one trivia at a time, are not fine en masse.

*

They say frogs won't notice they're boiling if the water gets hot gradually. Things pile up gradually. Inconveniences multiply gradually. Weird shit stuffed in cupboards and under things breeds and multiplies until it's frankly astounding how much STUFF you can find in every imaginable area. Because it happens gradually. You see it, but it doesn't sink it. Then one day you see the whole pattern and it does.

Why do we let it go? It's not just 'things', it's 'situations'. How many times have I seen a situation a friend is in and thought, "I would never put up with that." Whether it's the behavior of a spouse or boss or child, or whatever. But you know, they probably didn't start putting up with that. First it was just one little thing. Then another. Until it snowballed into a ridiculous and even dysfunctional situation. But it boiled my friend by surprise because the increase was gradual. I've had my share of boilings myself, of course.

If we had more here-now focus, more sense of self, would we be more inclined to nip inconveniences in the bud, rather than just deal with it?

And while I'm at it, what kind of logic is, "It's ok, it won't kill me." WTF? So what if it won't kill you, neither will arsenic in small doses, does that justify any given thing being tolerated?!

Kinda reminds me of that digitally animated movie A Bug's Life. The grasshoppers at a bar are joking about, what kind of harm can one crazy disgruntled ant do? And their leader, Hopper, says something like, You're right, and he tossed a seed in the air as if it represented an ant, what harm can an ant be? And laughed with them--and then angrily yanked open this chute and utterly buries them in these seeds. He says the issue with ants is numbers, which makes it a serious issue indeed, even if their comparative size/strength individually is not.

His point: if you don't deal with the single issues as they arise, someday you'll have an army of issues to deal with all at once, and that'll be a lot harder to deal with.

Well in a way this perfectly describes "clutter" and "inconvenience" (and other things -- from relationships to kitchens to fat cells to whatever). We let any number of minor things and inconveniences bug us because it seems like more trouble to stress on solving it than just to accept that it won't kill us.

(Yes, I know I'm using the bad guy in an animated film for my philosophy, but stay with me here. I grew up on Disney, I can cry over cartoon movies and commercials, and I even liked the Bee Gees. I am not ashamed.)

I feel that keeping all the highcarb stuff represents the things I hold onto that I not only don't really want but know will harm me, but cling to solely because I have something invested in them.
I feel that spaces stuffed with outdated food and bowl-less lids and such represents things I have ignored that are missing or going bad in my life.
I feel that prime in-my-face spaces stuffed with things I don't much use, while the things I need are nearly out of reach, represents some problem with priorities and attention, like filling my life with such busy-ness that I forget to pray or sleep enough, as one of innumerable examples.

What if, like the mystics say, we actually look at our surroundings as extensions of ourselves?

What if we actually expect that everything we have we should love, and if we don't love it (figuratively speaking here), we should give it away, not keep it prisoner in an environment where it is not utilized or respected? This goes for situations, not just things.

*

As for the sheer amount of stuff around me:

Sometimes I feel like every single item/object in a room is taking some tiny little piece of my attention just by existing in proximity.

When I'm in very minimalist rooms with a sense of space, I tend to be more creative, more relaxed, and feel rather like more (a larger %) of my "awareness of inner self" is available, since it is not busy with my external surroundings, and not numbed and distracted by the sheer quantity of them.

And every item that is messy, out of place, uninteresting, unwanted, broken, mismatched, etc. seems to add just a little bit of darkness to the mix.

There's a reason magazine ads show large open rooms with lots of light and space. It feels good, psychologically.

So I live in a small dark box some bad architect in the 1950s designed to build cheap. I can deal. But nearly everything I have to gripe about inside my house is something that I can change, and more importantly, something that often, I've made far worse than it was to begin with, or ignored for years, or seriously failed to make even the smallest intelligent decision to resolve.

Apparently the real problem wasn't my dim and boxy little house, it was me.

And it's not that I suddenly have a problem. It's that I had a problem paying attention to the little things when they began eons ago, and went into denial of the big things when they finally manifested quite some time ago, until I just "woke up" one day recently and said, "Hold up here! I've had an unfinished painting job and no cupboard doors for years now! WTF is wrong with me? That's ridiculous! Solve that right now!"

*

So tonight I did the fridge. Tomorrow I'm doing the canisters and the bottles on the counter. By Friday I should have more counter space and convenience than I've ever had here in eight years.

The important thing is this: It was always there. The opportunity and option was always present. It is merely my lack of attention, intention, whatever, that kept me from observing it, seizing it, and doing something about it.

Every problem I thought of while looking around my kitchen, I realized there was a solution for. All I've seen for years is a kitchen of problems. All I saw tonight was a kitchen filled with answers, and potential too long ignored and badly managed by me.

Maybe that's a lot of my life, too. My health, body/mind/spirit, has no problem for which it does not also have at least one solution. The question is, will I look for it properly, with the open mind to find it? Will I recognize the need to bother looking in the first place? Will I put forth the effort to make it work once I see?

I have a great kitchen, really, despite how bad off it is now and how much I've complained about it -- and I have a great body, really, despite the same general situation. Both are over-stuffed, disorganized, unfinished and badly treated. But they have great potential, and if I treat things well and regularly make an effort, both might turn out to be better than I ever dared hope for.

*

Some people use church, ancient philosophers, or psychotherapists for analysis. Tonight, I used my kitchen. Make use of the tools at hand. :-)

PJ

"You Know It Don't Come Easy"

2008-06-04T00:01:00.001-05:00

I admit it: I deal poorly with failure. You'd think I'd have adapted by now. That by this age of 42, I'd have evolved some kind of gentle but firm, persistent discipline that my friends have so often had. I so admire that. I sometimes think the people I've chosen as friends have often been people with the qualities I most lacked.

This is an odd thing to admit--and will just make me sound like an egotist--but I was blessed, or maybe it's cursed, with a seeming gift for naturally acquiring skills. Just about anything I've ever wanted to do in my life, I decided to do, and it turned out I was pretty talented in that area. From sports to music to intellectual topics to creativity of many kinds, it didn't matter. It's always just been a given.

When I was 12 at the skating rink they made me race the 18 year olds and start halfway back the rink and I still beat them. When I was in 5th grade my teacher used my SAT scores to talk with the class about 'potential' because I'd scored at college level in every area (I think Math was slightly lower). (Irony: I nearly failed 5th grade. My mom died late the year before and I wasn't real happy then.) In high school I read the textbooks the first couple days, aced most the tests the rest of the year that were based on it, to the fury of my friends who studied and did more poorly, and I read science fiction the rest of the time. (Not surprisingly, I nearly failed most of high school, too.)

When I decided to teach myself guitar as a teen, my friends, who'd had years of lessons and were working on the same music I was, practiced daily in earnest. I played around for 15 minutes, ignored it for a week, and was better than them by the next weekend, as if my subconscious were working on it. They'd get furious at me, at how unfair it was. They were right: it was. When I decided to enter the local (today they'd call it "Indie") scene with my original music, people were so ridiculously nice to me I kept looking at them suspiciously. Musicians better than I'll ever be would just unfold from the woodwork to talk with me and play with me and invite me to stuff. From trivial skills like soul-train dancing as a kid to more useful stuff like subtle language skills for hypnosis/NLP, to a long list of business skills and insert-anything-here, I've had it remarkably easy in life.

My life has been significantly difficult in other areas. Maybe the universe is compensating.

And so... I didn't learn to practice. I didn't learn much discipline. I didn't learn anything about persistence. And because anything I bothered trying to do, I did well with remarkably little effort--and I didn't do things that I wasn't good at I suspect, and didn't need to since I had plenty of other choices--I never learned to deal with failure.

*

When I gained a couple hundred pounds quickly, and dieting by the high-carb standard didn't do anything for me (except make me so miserable I didn't think I could survive it), I was at a loss. I was 24 and for the first time in my life I had utterly and completely failed. Not only had I become terminally uncool -- so much that the career in music I planned since I was 5, my hundreds of songs in a binder from the time I was a teen, were all for nought -- but then as if to nail that case closed, my diet efforts failed abysmally to change it.

I didn't know what to do to fix it. I did everything by the book, hard and perfectionist, and failed. Given no female in my mom's family had successfully avoided being huge, I figured that was it, I was doomed. Baffled by my failure, and having no idea how to handle it, I went another way: after deciding (barely) not to shoot myself, I just immersed myself in my work and personal interests--generally those which did not require being physically seen by another human being.

*

There is a thing sometimes called state-specific consciousness that refers to memory being associated with certain states of mind. For example, if in one state of mind you had experience A and learned skill B, then for some people, in a different state of mind, they might have a fairly minimal grasp of that memory and skill--but if they shift their state of mind back to where they were 'present' when those experiences happened and skills developed, the memories and skills are fully accessible to them. It's a bit of a phenomenon.

I'm a high hypnotic and I've got a good deal of this. Half of what I've done through my adult professional life I probably couldn't do today, without regressing to a mental state much like I had when I did that work (by imagining myself in that situation/etc.), and I assume that as usual, I'd pick up the memories and skills again. In some areas of my personal life -- including my obesity -- this has an odd way of surprising me.

(Aside from that: there is a TV show called The Pretender that I always felt was a more-advanced version of some innate skill humans have access to, and that's like a secondary part of the phenomenon: the ability to put oneself in a state of mind that is so highly 'receptive' to every kind of subtle information, memory and more, that one can do more than the objective time/info-invested would imply they should be able to. Some would call this psychic; others would just consider it having access to a vast database of mnemonic, subconscious information.)

*

I recently attempted some half-squats, and had dismal luck with them. I'm sure with something firmer to hold onto I will do ok. I can do a full squat but my knees feel terror. (Literally, and speaking of 'phenomena': the sense I have is that the fear is felt by my knees, not my head for my knees. Odd!)

I was SO ANGRY that I couldn't just DO it, that I ended up just stomping out, this was days aog, and haven't gone back to my weights room since.

Because: I really have a problem with failure.

I just need to accept that I am not a 19 year old tennis playing windsurfing judo throwing California girl fashion zombie performer anymore... I am a 42 year old mega-morbidly obese midwestern mom now. It just keeps pissing me off!

So the reasonable question is: If you're 42 years old, and you've been insanely fat for nigh on 20 years, why aren't you used to it already? Why is a full mirror or store window a ghastly, horrifying shock? Why is who and what you are now surprising in any way? What part of the last 20 years didn't prepare you for your condition of today?

*

The reality is that I have deliberately paid so little attention to myself for the last 20 years that it seems like there was the me that was 'aware' all that time ago, and then the me that is just waking up to being more aware of myself today... as if the 20 years in the middle, in terms of my perception of self, have been bizarrely condensed into a few weeks of moments of attention separated by long duration periods of denial.

So now that I am finally "paying attention to myself" more, it feels like, "Whoa, what the -- what?! You have GOT to be kidding me!"

I can't believe I can't do a squat. I can't believe that my eight pound dumbbell weights are plenty. I can't believe I wear a 5x (if slightly stretchy) pants size. I can't believe that horrible image in the pictures is me. I can't believe that reflection in the store window is me. I am stunned, even dumbfounded at times, as if I woke up one day in the body of someone different, and the dreams got me used to life and the history, but the conscious self is completely unadapted to my new reality.

Because I quit paying attention. When I realized (or believed) that I could not change my weight, that I could not salvage the future I planned until then, that I could not bear the horrible fact of my rather swift and profound obesity, the ghastly spectre of it overwhelmed me, and I just . . . tuned out.

And so, the realization, and the frustration, and the coming-to-terms, that I should have done at the age of 24, I am now doing at the age of 42.

And despite that I consciously understand my condition--I don't even try to run, for example--still, the dominant part of me thinks that I should be as tough and athletic as I was last time I knew me--last time I was paying attention.

That part of me thinks that it ought to be easy, like everything used to be. That I ought to be able to go in there and lift weights, or whatever else I might want to do, and do very well with it. That I should pick an intelligent eating plan like the one Regina outlined and within days, weeks, months, be the poster child for nutritional good sense as a result.

*

I am regularly amazed that eating low carb, AND eating healthily, AND getting exercise, are only easy until they are hard. Too often so far, on the day something gets hard, I quit doing it. Because somehow I have managed to so effortlessly be good at things throughout my life, that I haven't developed the persistent discipline you'd expect from a well-raised farm boy of 10.

So I am also learning, as if I am a small child, about staying with something that is hard. Aside from the business environment (where all those adaptive traits abound in me for some reason, probably for the same reason other skills come easy), I haven't got that trait in my personal life yet.

I'm learning about having to work at something, like my friends did. About having to be persistent, and having to deal with failure -- repeatedly -- and pick myself up, dust off my butt and get back to what I know I want to be doing.

*

The good news is, low-carb has given me a doorway to success. There was no hope, I thought, all those years ago. There was no point to trying, or to paying attention to myself, if it was hopeless. I used to say, "Only optimists kill themselves. Pessimists aren't surprised their life sucks." I was pessimistic enough about the outlook of my obesity to turn my attention elsewhere, to something I thought I could make a difference with, which was "anything but my body".

Maybe for men looking to lose 20 pounds, lowcarb is a quick fix. But for someone starting at over 500 pounds at one point, even the best eating plan in the world is going to be a very long term effort to lose that extra weight--and it's entirely possible that it will never fully come off. As a result, the "persistence for the long term" becomes more critical in someone like me. Anybody can do some-big-deal for a limited duration. But for the morbidly obese (and diabetic), the lowcarb eating plan is a rest-of-your-life thing.

Lowcarb isn't really a wagon to fall off. There is only one true failure point in low carb eating: when you die. Until then, you have another day, another meal, another hour, another chance to do it right, to drag up the energy to eat well enough to feel well enough to move well enough to lose well enough to change your life. You gotta start somewhere. For some of us it's a lot higher than others.

But no matter the reason someone eats lowcarb, one truism exists: on lowcarb ketogenic, the eating part is the easy part. It's the wrapping your head around yourself and where you really are and all the changes you go through, that merely attempting to lose weight (let alone succeeding!) bring on.

It doesn't come fast. It doesn't come without a monumental learning curve about nutrition and metabolism and your own unique body--and mind. It's a long hard road, and it takes persistence -- and the ability to deal with occasional failure in one respect or another -- to succeed.

It doesn't come easy. But it comes.