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
.
Sunday, October 4
Thursday, September 24
Hyper-Nutrient
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.
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
.
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
.
Thursday, September 10
Birthdays and Goals
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
.
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
.
Saturday, September 5
August 09 Collected Trivia
The little things: stuff in August that wasn't big enough deal for a whole blog post.
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."
"The man who does not read a newspaper is uninformed. The man who does read the newspaper is misinformed."
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
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
Sunday, August 9
Teen-age Low-Carb: 90% Angst, 10% Protein
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
.
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
.
Sunday, July 26
Pestomania and Big Green Cooties
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
.
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
.
Friday, July 24
Bacon Mushroom Parmy Chicken
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
.
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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Monday, July 20
10 Biggest Lessons for the Biggest People
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
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
Tuesday, March 24
Morbid Obesity: Protein Salvation
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
.
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
.
Saturday, January 17
What to DO With All These Eggs? Need Ideas!
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
.
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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