I wrote in my last blog post about my Hyper-Nutrient plan. That is going fine.
Here's a few trivias so far.
Vitamin C is not actually a vitamin you need a little of, but a liver enzyme you need a lot of. Somewhere between 'conspiracy' and 'ignorance' is the Vitamin C subject in our world, much like the carbohydrate issue. Google it, and Linus Pauling, and read everything in sight for about 10 nights and a couple weekends, and you will be on the same page with me about it. Summary: I am taking as much of it orally as I can without flushing effects.
How much you can take before the 'excess' starts flushing (the runs, to put it plainly) depends apparently on how much there is inside your body for it to take care of. (And it takes care of a LOT of stuff. This is one amazing enzyme.) So far I'm able to take about 16g per day, 3-4g every few hours, without side effects. This implies that there's a lot of work to be done inside I guess. I would attempt actual treatment with larger IV doses, but all the docs I see who do that are in California for the most part.
Vitamin D is a hormonal precursor, which as it turns out you also need a lot of (especially if you're very fat), unless you are living naked in Argentina. I take around 5-10,000iu per day, but have taken up to about 50,000 without any noticeable side effects. When I first began taking it (around 5,000iu) I had a marked increase in my "sense of well-being". Haven't really noticed anything specific since then one way or the other.
I've also been taking double-doses of calcium, magnesium, potassium, the spectrum of B vitamins, Vitamin E, and vitamin K2. And a multi which has Vitamin A (that has a toxic dose that isn't real high so I avoid much supplementing with that one). Oh yea, and co-enzyme CQ10.
More on results further below. Tomorrow starts week three of my eating plan experiment and this is the week that I add in all the "other" supplements. I am already pretty tired of taking pills and this is a zillion more. Oy!
PāNu
Just before/during the first week of this current eating plan experiment I happened upon the PāNu blog. (I cannot figure out how to make that "ā" with HTML so have had to just 'copy' it from his site. I hope your browser can see it.) This is the website of Dr. Kurt G. Harris M.D. who, after reading Gary Taubes's seminal book Good Calories, Bad Calories ('The Diet Delusion' in the UK), decided to go public with a blog partly in support of the cause.
The detail of Dr. Harris's plan is here: http://www.paleonu.com/get-started/
In a nutshell, it's lowcarb, with no grains/legumes/sugars, no veggie/seed oils, fairly high-fat, with some degree of Intermittant Fasting, and Vitamin D3 supplementation. Three points on his plan that I am not abiding by currently are 9, 10 and 12, which are grass-fed meats, exercise, and removal of the last shred of dairy (cheese). All the others I am not on track with.
Now, nearly everything on that list I have done at one time or another over the last 2.5 years (of not losing any real weight I might add). But I haven't necessarily done them together. So that part, that is a change for me.
I have added this eating plan to my "Hyper-Nutrient" plan currently going on and am doing them together.
Since reverting back to low carb, I lost from the water-gain (404) down to what I believe is my 'real' weight (384). Anything beyond that I consider actual body mass of some kind lost, not fluid.
My eating plan, aside from hypernutrient, had an expected problem: eating very low carb (<30 carbs/day), each time I've tried this for the last 2.5 years, I feel like crap. Just really BAD. More to the point, I cannot sustain it. I go off into carbs almost immediately, even lowcarb versions (e.g. peanut butter), anything. So over the last 2.5 years I've tried a little bit of everything. Add in some dairy. Add in some fruit. Add in some legumes. Everything I have tried to increase my carbs has led to me going off the wagon. Or, in the case of legumes, I could stay on that one just fine, but I didn't lose a single pound of weight.
I know myself by now. In the first case there's something actually wrong and I'm miserable and my body's reacting to fix it. In the second case I'm being triggered. Nothing has actually worked very well for me and it's been a long time. Maybe VLC would still work for weight loss but that's a little like the low-fat/low-cal approach: if you cannot sustainably live on that, for whatever reason it might be (in my case, a mystery, maybe hormonal), then it doesn't matter.
So I never really did get a clear plan of what I was going to eat except 'low carb' without stress on the low part, high fat with some stress on that just for vitamin absorption, and hope like hell I can find some way back and forth to avoid ending up under the wagon. When I found Harris' PāNu I decided to make that my official eating plan, to the degree I could, along with the Hyper-Nutrient supplementation, and this includes eating twice a day (~3pm & 9pm).
In week 1, I lost 3.5 pounds.
In week 2, I lost 3.5 pounds.
Kinda odd it's the exact same amount each week. And unlike my normal lose/gain-a-ton / or almost nothing, which is mostly fluid. I have reason to believe this is actual fat loss.
Weirder still, I feel ok. Not energetic, but not tired. Just 'ok'.
It has been a really long time since I specifically had weight that I felt was fat loss. Now maybe seven pounds is not damn much to be celebrating about at my weight, but it is the first genuine fat loss I have seen happening off my body in a really long time!
So much of my existing plan was so similar to this already that it's hard to see what has changed, aside from doing all the points "at once" rather than irregularly depending on what I was trying, and adding the supplements of course, and mild IF. I don't know if I can credit some weight loss to a ton of sudden Vitamin C helping with something, to some jungian body exercises I've done, to the shift to some degree of intentional IF, or to PāNu having caused me to combine my habits in a certain way.
Regarding IF, I have taken the last week to eating these coconut bites that are 1 Tbsp coconut oil each, eating just one bite with a vitamin dose, then another a few hours later, etc. so when I am not eating food I am actually getting a tiny number of calories in. Probably same/less as anyone who drinks coffee with cream. My goal is to keep my metabolism from falling into 'off' mode which it seems to do abnormally well, while still keeping macronutrients low. Since my weight gain has come from eating once a day and most my weight loss from eating many times a day, I'm looking for a compromise there to see if this works. So far, at least, it is.
I will update this with progress.
But given how I have kvetched about feeling betrayed and confused and lost and demoralized, I thought I should be blogging about actually trying something that seems to be working for me. Here's hoping it keeps coming together!
PJ
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