The Theosophy of Produce

I swear.

I had this idea I wanted to do carb cycling and document the results, much like Big Daddy D and his wife have done.

But I suck at doing anything consistently, apparently. It's been like a month and I think I've actually had a proper number of calories and carbs only a few times. No, I'm not overeating, you know me, I've hardly been eating at all, which is just as much screwing up any kind of decent cycle tracking as anything else -- not to mention that since eating and frequently is what causes weight LOSS in me, I've not lost a pound the last month.

That always makes me want to use my scale to whack some "calories is what it's all about!" theorist upside the head.

Today my weight dropped back to 379, which didn't really cheer me up much, since that's what it was a month ago when I started this! My last entire month of calories ingested equals maybe a week's worth if I were eating properly. I so irk myself. Or as Pink so rightly said in a song,

I'm a hazard to myself
Don't let me get me
I'm my own worst enemy

So today we went grocery shopping, as last Friday was my payday. It was, as usual, an overly long, utterly exhausting super walmart trip and put-away project, replete with my always-pleading-for-something ten year old fashion-zombie drama-queen.

I realized while shopping that I was craving fruit. The blueberries, raspberries, strawberries. Green grapes, black grapes, and I stared at the bing cherries like they were little clusters of religious inspiration. The grapefruit and lemons and limes and mandarin oranges. My eyes rolled up in my head.

Of course these are all carby, though the berries less so, so I passed them by thinking, "I'll live without them."

I reached the area filled with pies, cakes (I love buttercream frosting more than sex, is that wrong?), cookies, and really more importantly to my heart, bread of every imaginable kind. Now, if I have the slightest cravings, if I am hungry, if I am vulnerable in any way, this is the section I avoid. These are the aisles I could find myself standing in like a walking coma patient, gently drooling down the chin.

Fortunately, since I don't eat carbs much, I don't really have craving problems.

Oddly, I didn't today either. I stopped in the middle of an aisle and thought about that. Why would I be craving every kind of fruit if I wasn't even blinking over the foods filled with carbs and sugar that dependably haunt me if I'm in "that mode" when I shop? That WAS odd. Usually I can be utterly sure if I crave anything whatsoever, that the high-sugar/carb foods my taste buds love most will give me insulin shock from three feet away.

I looped back into the produce dept. to get my vegetables. Some romaine lettuce, green onions, regular onions, roma tomatoes, poblano peppers, anaheim chilis, banana peppers, red bell peppers, jalapeno peppers -- you may start to suspect I like peppers -- and cilantro. I stood next to the asparagus thinking, "Mmmmm, Asparagus." (You'll have to imagine Homer Simpson's voice for that.)

I don't actually like asparagus.

Now, when I start craving foods that are (a) any shade of green, and (b) that I don't even like, I know only two possible things have happened:

1) I have reached some carb-starvation point after being out of ketosis, and have not yet transitioned back into it, and am so desperate for carbs I'm about ready to go graze on my overgrown lawn.

I don't think this is the case right now.

2) My body is deficient in God knows how many elements, vitamins, minerals, trace elements, etc. and is trying to get me to eat foods likely to have some of them.

But most those fruits are {insert theme from JAWS} CARBY! {theme from Psycho}

And everybody knows that Carby is my equivalent of Cooties. Don't want those!

***

After traversing half the store for everything else imaginable, from lip gloss and eye drops to 5 dozen eggs (only on lowcarb is every other week Easter!), I got to thinking about what some of my journal buddies call "Intuitive Eating."

Basically, that you work on listening to what your body is saying, and you eat that.

Generally, my body is on "no-speakies" terms with me. If I ate intuitively I'd probably starve to death. Or rather, just enough to ratchet the metabolism down yet FURTHER and gain yet more weight, sigh!

Seriously. I think if researchers could figure out my body-fat storage we could save the entire third world from starvation.

Shoulder-Angel gripes at me. "So! Now that your body is finally TALKING TO YOU, after nearly two weeks of almost zero appetite, your only response to this is to ignore all its requests and walk away?!"

Pop!-goes my Shoulder-Devil. Damn that man is ALWAYS on time.

"You'd be eating too many carbs if you had much fruit, and what you CAN have is hardly enough to count. Besides, what if you were so inspired by all that sugar that you {gasp of horror} ATE FRUIT ALL DAY?! I mean, who knows where it could lead? One minute you're eating a cherry and the next minute, bam, you're being heli-vac'd from the bread aisle floor of Super Wal-mart to the Tulsa Cardiology Unit."

Shoulder-Angel snorts. He thinks Shoulder-Devil is a ridiculous drama queen, and that even my child is entirely my own fault, merely living up to that age-old curse of all mothers: "I hope you have a child JUST LIKE YOU!" He seldom seems sympathetic to my side of things, frankly.

He makes his case. "Your eating sucks anyway. Do you honestly think it is better to do the same mostly-foodless habits that made you huge in the first place, than it is to "eat fruit all day because your body probably needs whatever healthy chemicals they may contain?" How many days do you think this could last, anyway? You compost more produce than you eat."

Hmmn. He has a point. Since he is telling me a little of what I want to hear, which happens approximately once every seven years, I'm surprised at how I seem to be on the side of all that's good for once.

SD gets that LOOK that I hear some Weight Watchers leaders get when someone weighs out heavier than last week. (That look, for the record, was the sole province of catholic school teaching nuns until 1967, when they offered franchising.) "You weigh five pounds lesssss than yessssterday," he hissed, with smug satisfaction at having discovered the deep inner core of evil in me: just as things are going well, how could I have such unholy wants, like to EAT A CHERRY?!

"You should be NOT EATING now, so as to keep up that momentum!" he dictated.

I considered it. He's right. I really should. I'm not usually hungry anyway, so why not keep those carbs REALLY low.

Yeah, he's right. I'll get protein! You know, I've been thinking of getting one of those pre-seasoned pork roasts, my kid loves those. Sure, a few carbs, but it's easy to cook in the crockpot after all. I cross the aisle and grab one off the shelf.

I turn it over and read its ingredients, which look like an only slightly abbreviated listing of the current Library of Congress catalog. I see this little fine print that says, "With up to 30% of flavoring solution."

Thirty percent! And I thought the "10%" solution in most modern packaged meats was bad enough! No wonder it felt so... er... mushy, like I was squeezing a silicone breast implant rather than a solid piece of meat.

(Not that I would have ANY idea what those feel like. I am not that kind of girl. Which seems like a real shame sometimes.)

"Ah," said SD, "But hey babe, it's protein! Carbs baaaaad. Protein gooood, right?"

SA rolls his eyes. "Don't you SEE how STUPID this is?!" he says in exasperation.

***

I went back to produce, bought one of nearly every kind of fruit they had, and left.

This week, I'm going to be eating fruit and greek salad and some protein -- I have tons of grass-fed organic beef in my garage chest freezer.

And if a week of eating way too many carbs because I am ingesting fruits kills me, well, it will be all my shoulder Angel's fault for the advice. I trust that if this happens, he will be forced by some kind of Culinary Karma to be my personal driver for the first several years of my time in eternity. Surely he's right. He wouldn't risk that. Would he??

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Edited to Update: So I ate 'a little' carby fruit a few times that week. And the world did not end. And it didn't throw me from ketosis though it did seem to have a delayed effect in possible carb-cravings.

Life is an Experiment.

Bodybuilders may be experts at losing fat, but I am an expert at gaining it. Gee I wonder if I could relocate to Africa and be a high paid consultant for the cultures that consider fat beautiful.

I outlined a new eating plan for myself previously based on doing the exact opposite of what I did to get so fat. It's a great plan. Except that because it's more about sanity and moderation, neither area being a strong point for me obviously, I very shortly failed to be on any plan at all.

This was followed by my attempts to work out a carb-calorie-fat cycling plan based on Tom Venuto's plan. That whole percentage thing ended up so complicated to work out my menus for that I gave up. So from January to mid-May I had no plan, gained a little back, mostly water weight, and I am nearly back to where I left off. It's aggravating to have to keep "retracing" steps I already worked hard for.

Friends and I were talking the other day about how the long "stalls" people claim really should probably be considered "maintenance for awhile" in some cases. When people can't really focus/plan/cook/eat/exercise as they need to for losing weight, but they are at least not relapsing into cultural lousy eating habits, it isn't really a failure to lose weight, but a success in staying on plan and NOT gaining any. No matter how long it takes to gradually lose weight, if one is not gaining it, it could definitely be worse. I'm here to tell you... it could be worse.

o0o

With the wisdom of hindsight, I now understand that anything "sane" and "moderate" will not work for me at the moment, because if I am not "forced to pay close attention and count stuff," then I am simply not paying enough attention, period. Attention, intention, and expectation are critical to the success of anything. I'm very driven by what's in my head... I'm convinced that my weight loss is not just a matter of numbers but a matter of what I want to create in my reality.

I also admit that I have not been particularly good at following any plan at all. That I have done ok losing weight can probably be chalked up solely to the fact that I weighed so damn much to begin with.

Problems: I don't eat often enough, and don't eat enough protein, enough calories, or even enough carbs (since I usually do want to stay in a certain range) most days. This is a combination of factors. First, that most of my life I didn't eat until night, and so it's easy for me to shine on or just forget to eat until late afternoon or evening. Second, that I'm lazy and tend to fail to plan and fail to prepare, resulting in me not having food available when I am working or otherwise busy, so I end up skipping food since I haven't time to cook and don't want to eat off-plan.

I know that a lot of people who have problems eating too much, or binging, or craving carbs, probably dream of having my problem. But the reality is that I got this fat greatly thanks to the 'starvation response' to begin with. I've often tracked my food alongside someone else's who weighed like 1/4 - 1/3 what I did, and eaten the same things, same quantities, and not lost weight. That's why I get so irked when people act like if someone is morbidly obese they must just be daily ingesting 3 pounds of bon-bons so gosh, if they'd just stop that, surely all would be well. Obviously between body metabolism, food allergens, eating frequency and more, there are other considerations.

But I am determined to set a goal and a standard, and just work toward achieving that. For the remainder of my 12 week cycle (about 9 1/2 weeks), I am going to EXPERIMENT with a carb cycling ketogenic diet. Let's see how it works. My weight chart is online, I'll add in my CCKD info somewhere so if there is a correlation after a few weeks of it, between loss/gain/unchanged, maybe it will be apparent to all.

o0o

Big Daddy D started a carb cycling plan after hearing me talk about this many months ago. He posted results that he had. It is SO invaluable for lowcarbers to actually experiment with this stuff, and document the results. If we don't do this kind of experimentation, it just isn't done, or isn't known to us.

I am using a TWO WEEK CYCLE (14 days). Technically I'm beginning 6/1 tomorrow, but the start of 'week 1' on the cycling plan actually begins Monday 6/4.

My New CCKD Plan

To simplify, all Monday through Friday are 'normal'. Week 1, the weekend is lower carb than normal. Week 2, Saturday is higher carb, Sunday is lower carb. That is to jump start getting back into ketosis after the high-carb day knocks it out. And the high carb is only one day per two weeks. (It might need to be more. But I have to start my experiment somewhere.)

Normal is up to 40 carbs. That's total, not deducting any fiber or sugar alcohols. Counting ECC it comes out to closer to 20 (particular since most of my carbs come either from fibrous veggies or high-fiber ingredients like flax seed or almond meal or high-protein bake mixes).

Lower carb than usual is 15 or less carbs. That's total, not ECC. Essentially this means I eat meat, eggs, and a protein drink.

Higher carb is approximately 150 carbs. I'm going to see how this works, I may adjust it downward, but I want it to be high enough to be a major difference, and to allow some things I will never get to eat otherwise.

If the carb cycle were a graph, it would look like this for a month:


If this doesn't work, I will try something different in the next 12 week cycle. The problem is that as I lose weight, it becomes hard to tell if a difference is related to my eating plan, or weight loss slowing/the body attempting to find homeostasis, or muscle gain from starting to work out and get some cardio, etc.

I am making the following safety rules to go with my high-carb days, though.

1. Any non-LC food must be planned in advance. Whether it's dinner out or what I note below, it should be planned. That's the only way I can keep carbs and calories in the range they need to be. It's not a "hog-wild" day, it's a "deliberate big increase for a single day".

2. There should be an emphasis on things I like but don't get to eat on lowcarb but that are relatively healthy as far as nutrients and variety go, like legumes (maybe pinto or black beans), and carby veg/fruits (like corn, or fresh-squeezed citrus juice), and maybe oatmeal (which I adore).

3. I don't have any problem with lousy food on that day as long as it's small and planned in advance. If eating one single-pack slice of key lime pie every 2 weeks helps me stay totally on plan the rest of the two weeks, I'm willing to do that. As I get thinner I probably won't have as much leeway on such things but for now I think I do. As long as the numbers come out right I'm not complaining.

4. Here's the hard part: I have to eat sufficient protein on the highcarb days too. Which usually means lowcarb food and a lot of it, to get that much protein down my throat (120g). So the reality is that these days are more likely to be standard days "with several high-carb snacks" than a whole day of just eating whatever.

Life is an experiment. I have proved fabulously successful at the unintentional Getting Hugely Fat experiment. Now I want to continue my trials in the Getting Vastly Thinner experiment. If this doesn't work, I'll do something else. But I think it will. Now that I have everything -- food journal, weight tracking, exercise tracking -- publicly on googledocs for anybody to see, I guess everybody will be able to see just how successful (or not!) I might turn out to be with the new experiment. Wish me luck. ;-)

PJ
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