Food Angst and Holidays

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

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

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

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

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

She might be right.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Journal Trolls

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

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

Neurosis and Food

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

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

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

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

Holiday Food

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

PJ

The Legos of Low-Carb

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

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

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

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

Sacrificing Competence in the Name of Perfection

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

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

Oh yeah... that helped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Truth About Super Obesity and Weight Loss

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 10,000 Ways That Don't Work

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

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

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

VLC, Hyper-Nutrient, and Mysteries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or is it the nutrient supplementation?

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

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

PJ

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.

Hyper-Nutrient: Details

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PJ
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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

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
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