Tuesday, August 31, 2010

August 31st

August may well have been the longest month on record - at least, it sure seemed like it.  Whatever the length, I lost about 6 pounds in August, and that's not so bad.  Down to 156.0 this morning - fingers still puffy, but most of the monthly water gain is on its way out.  I did not have wine or any starches yesterday, and found myself launching out of bed twice last night - always the left leg.  But since we were dealing all night with a sick dog, the leg cramps were reduced to background noise, basically.  Whatever the reason, I'm (dare I say it?) dog tired this morning.

A kind of funny thing happened today.  I think I mentioned last week about my Monday night spent failing to find any business attire that fit for a meeting on Tuesday.  This morning, Lee needed to wear a suit - or at least a jacket and tie - for a meeting at work.  Navy blue suit pants - too big.  Gray suit pants - might fit, but he hadn't recognized them on return from being altered and took them back, thinking they weren't his (oops).  He's basically in the same spot I was, although he still wants to lose a fair amount of weight before declaring victory.

I started work on my third skirt yesterday.  With the pattern ease, the size I bought may end up being a bit roomy.  I will have to try it on before attaching the waistband this time - and I'm doing the lining a bit differently - I'll put it on with hand-stitching after the waistband is on.  I think that will be a bit more flexible if I have to do any other alterations.

Monday, August 30, 2010

August 30th

Weird weekend from an eating standpoint.  Saturday I had breakfast (Denny's make-your-own omelet), lunch (3 naked hotdogs), snacks (cheese), dinner (which I don't recall at all - oh! 1.5 brats and some pork-and-beans and sliced tomatoes and a glass of pretty nasty chardonnay in our new restaurant riedels which are going through the dishwasher right now...), none of which was particularly carby, but I guess it was pretty salty, because I ended up 1.6 pounds heavier on Sunday morning than on Saturday morning (156.0 to 157.6).  Yesterday I didn't want breakfast, had Qdoba naked burrito without rice but with guac for lunch, a minor snack (more cheese), and pot roast with miniature potatoes and carrots for dinner.  And lost .6 pounds of the weight from the day before (so I'm at 157.0 this morning, ugh).  Go figure.  It's time for the monthly week of fun-with-water-retention, so I probably should just ignore the scale, but getting on it first thing in the morning has become such a habit.  I'll look, but I won't freak out.

Friday, August 27, 2010

A night's sleep is a wonderful thing

So yesterday, I had a bag of potato chips from a vending machine, and ate two crispy chile rellenos as well as chips and salsa for dinner.  Took an Advil PM, and knew nothing until 4:30 am.  Granted, I'm carrying a bit over a pound of water this morning - weight's at 156.6 - but I needed the rest.  I don't think carb-loading is a viable long-term solution for the leg cramps, since it was carb-loading that got me to 191.4 pounds back in April, so I will be looking at other approaches over the next few days as I go back to eating normally.  Maybe a glass of wine with dinner will help.  Actually, that would just be an excuse to try out some new wine glasses we got from a friend with contacts - restaurant quality Riedels that can be put in the dishwasher and are reasonably priced.  But the wine may also help keep me from going into hard ketosis at 11:30 each night, or whatever it is that triggers the cramps.

Other than that, life is good.  The jeans I bought a few weeks ago are too big, and my brag-whine about that didn't sit well with Lee, who's stalled at 206ish.  He doesn't eat full-on paleo, and he won't give up breaded stuff and gravy and even sandwiches - and he'll admit that.  Perhaps reminding him that he's not being all that strict with eating right was untactful this morning - apparently he did not sleep for a 3-hour stretch of the wee hours.  His excuse is that he's on the road a lot right now for work.  True, but it is possible to eat pretty well on the road - there have been some stretches of road time where I actually lost weight (e.g., the funeral - and I didn't eat all that well that weekend either).  I feel for him, though - I thought I would never see the end of the evil number 162.2.

More sewing this weekend - even more important now after my wardrobe evisceration Monday night.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

August 26th

Omigosh am I tired this morning.  At one point I had both calves and a shin muscle firing off on me, and that was just one episode out of I-lost-count-how-many.  Add to that the distinctive sound of a dog getting ready to be sick, at 4:30 am, and I'm just a piece of used carbon, not even able to emit smoke.

I assume that the leg antics were associated with the whopping weight loss - 0.4 pounds overnight.  I'm down to 155.4, which is all well and good, but not worth the crap sleep involved.  Not entirely sure what I am going to do about it, but I think it will involve potatoes - maybe chips sometime during the day.  Or something.

Got a load of strawberries yesterday and had some with cream poured on them last night and again this morning for breakfast, which also included 6 strips of bacon.  Hopefully that will add some fuel, because I surely need it.

Ugh.  Just ugh.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

August 25th

Well, I guess it was worth it.  I had my ankle cramp up at 11:30 last night, then my calf went off a couple times in the 3 am neighborhood, so I had broken sleep.  But I got up this morning and weighed myself, and it said 155.8, which is 1.2 pounds down from yesterday.  I was surprised, to say the least.  The calf cramps were less intense than they've been for a while, which is maybe (!) a sign of adaptation on my part - at least, I would like to think so.  My body fat % is down to 26.9, which is also fairly mind-blowing.  But it's still projecting that 20% will be at about 143 pounds (that's just 12.8 pounds less than I weigh now - gaah!).

For what it's worth - and maybe hard to believe given my excitement at 155.8 - I would have been okay this morning if it had still said 157.  I'm getting a better bead on my mental attitude, and I think it's a sort of confidence that this way of eating will get me to my genetically-programmed proper weight, and that getting there will happen at its own pace.  So, while I'm still being pretty careful with my eating and saving the boluses (boli?) of carbs for special occasions - and even then, keeping the bolus small - I'm not getting hung up on the slower progress.

Just cool.  Totally cool.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

August 24th

Well, that was a bit of a shock.  I needed to wear "business attire" for a meeting today, so last night I went to try on a suit I'd bought about 4 years ago - size 14.  Looked like a bag - too big in so many ways it was actually amusing.  So I tried on a silk dress from before then - I thought it was a 14 but it was a 16.  Also huge and weird looking.  After a few more trials, I ended up with about a $600 pile of donations to the Disabled Vets and 2 dresses that fit the category and still mostly fit.  One is the funeral black dress, which fit in June (about 16 pounds ago) - I didn't try it on but am hoping for the best.  The other is a dress I bought about 7-8 years ago that fit a little on the tight side then.  It's okay now, but on the brink of being too big.  That's what I'm wearing today.  It's extremely comfortable, I must say (snort).

Still at 157.  Think I'm retaining cyclical water right now.  Had an ankle cramp last night but otherwise copacetic.

Monday, August 23, 2010

August 23rd

157.0 this morning, after a weekend that was fairly food-filled.  Not bad.  I have some sort of digestive upset going on just now - not sure what, just yet, but it involves a stomach ache of sorts.  Anyway, I'm crediting the addition of the heavy cream with the weight loss this week; I do think that was the key, and maybe has been all along.  And in the time since we bought it, I still haven't consumed an entire pint of it - including not just adding it to tea twice a day, but pouring it over sliced strawberries (also amazingly good).

I'm still having trouble getting over the salt-water solicitation from my family member.  I went to the trouble of web-searching the terms she suggested after I gently turned down the original solicitation, and saw nothing that would change my mind.  Then I searched for studies done on the efficacy of the salt water itself, and there are none - the product website says something like they're "not needed."  Well, I would agree that it's unlikely that salt-water in small doses will not kill anyone, but they are making claims backed only by anecdotal evidence - and who knows who is generating the anecdotes. 

One of the reasons I'm so sold on this way of eating is that it IS backed by studies - more of them each day, despite the fact that the funding is all on sustaining the SAD.  While I liked the initial results, I think it was Taubes who really sold this to me - he did such an amazing job of digging through mouldering piles of research and distilling what he found (yeah, right - "distilling" it into an 800-page book...).  Well, whatever.  It still makes sense, and continues to answer the nutritional questions I put to it.  So we'll be eschewing the salt water.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

August 21st

Golly. Stepped on the scale this morning and at first, thought I'd lost about half a pound. Then I looked closer - try 2 1/2 pounds. I'm down to 156.4 this morning. Don't know if I should credit the heavy cream for that little gift or not, but I'm happy with it.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Oh, gosh

So we get ourselves on a sane way of eating that, for me at least, has sorted out any number of physical complaints and/or ills, and we have that in stasis.  And what happens?  I get a heartfelt e-mail solicitation from a family member trying to set up yet another MLM business, who wants my extended family to buy bottles of a wonderful new supplement by the caseload (undoubtedly on some sort of monthly subscription plan).  I went to the site for the product and took a look.  And what is it, this miracle substance?

Salt Water. 

Seriously.  The ingredients are Distilled Water and Sodium Chloride.  I hardly know what to say.  Just as I think I've got the cramps under control, I'm being besought (it was a pretty fervent e-mail) to increase my sodium levels, which, with the ZC/VLC character of my regular diet, will likely remove every atom of Potassium from my body every night.  I am just not up for the tarantella any more.  So I said "no, thanks," but I wonder if sending her a copy of GCBC would make any difference in her life?

You know, from everything I've ever heard, placebos have always been sugar pills.  This is a new approach, I guess. 

August 20th

Well, that seems to have worked.  The heavy cream added to the diet being an assist to keeping things moving along, so to speak.  I'm having it twice a day - once at breakfast and once at night; the taste is beyond amazing and I can understand the recommendation to drink it mixed with seltzer water now - that would probably be really good as a cold drink.  But there's enough Englishman in my heritage that I tend to drink hot tea in 3-digit temperatures, so I don't need it cold just now.  May try it sometime.

Back into our routine - eggs-and-turkey-bacon for breakfast, no lunch (for me, usually), meat-and-plants for dinner, maybe a square of dark chocolate after.  I'm down to 159.0 this morning (maybe down more now...) which is good.  Still carrying a lot of water, though - fingers and ankles continue to be swollen and stiff.  So this morning, I doubled up on the fish oil as an anti-inflammatory; see if that will help.

Anyway, I'm not stressing about the weight being a stall at this point - and again, I think that's because I hit my original goal and am fitting into non-fat clothing (as opposed to eating non-fat foods LOL).  I'm starting to plan out wardrobe updates for fall, and probably even doing some sewing, a hobby that I used to love and that was increasingly frustrating of late as I produced things that looked quite amazingly horrible on me.  So maybe mentally, I'm transitioning from the "focus on weight loss" mindset to more of a "yeah, whatever, I'm thin" mindset, which is more of a maintenance thing.  I think I'll continue to lose, probably slower than I have been, and gradually settle somewhere between 160 and 140, whatever my genetic weight is meant to be.  No real temptation to go back to eating flour and sugar, either - but I've done so much reading about them that they seem, if not poisonous, at least vaguely sinister to me.  I can anticipate occasional desserts and holiday treats - but only occasional.  I have 2 boxes of strawberries in the fridge and will eat some and dry some - they make lovely good snacks dried - and they're crunchy, something this way of eating does lack.

I do mean to get back to weight training one of these days.  Because I would like to improve my strength some - and maybe make my visible muscles even more visible. They are SO fun to watch in the mirror - my forearms ripple as I'm drying my hair or brushing my teeth!

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Add a little heavy cream, and stir

159.6 this morning; the water started coming off just before midnight.  It's not all gone - my fingers are still puffy and so are my ankles - but it's definitely water, and it will go.

I started adding a bit more fat to the old diet last night, with a pint of organic, heavy whipping cream (only organic because it had the least number of non-cream ingredients - what's up with that, anyway?  all I want is the cream and they want to give me milk solids, polysorbate-80, and carrageenan).  Had some in my tea last night and again this morning.  First impression - a deep buttery yellow coming out of the carton - possibly more yellow than the butter sold at Costco.  Second impression - seriously delicious.  While I won't drink all my tea this way (after all, it makes for cups that have to be washed after a couple of uses), I will definitely keep drinking cream in some of it.

Hopefully, the added fat will also help with the end of the digestive cycle (I'm trying to put this delicately, here).  Not that it's been a real problem, but at the moment, I would like things to go a bit more smoothly.

I'm also thinking of trying it - unwhipped - on some cut up strawberries.  I have a feeling that the vanilla and sugar have been just getting in the way, in times past.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Oh, lovely

Fasted yesterday, ending with a giant chef's salad (several ounces of cheese and blue cheese dressing. So of course, this morning, I'm up to 161.0 from yesterday.  It's water, I think, but it's just bloody annoying.


Tuesday, August 17, 2010

August 17th

So it was probably an illusion.  On the other hand, my fingers were a bit swollen and stiff this morning when I weighed in at 160.8, so I don't really know.  And my stomach is a bit unsettled (and puffy), so I'll let things ride until those two factors work themselves out.

Wasn't hungry for breakfast, so today will probably be an IF day.

Monday, August 16, 2010

August 16th

Back from Arizona.  Weirdly enough, the hotel we were in for 2 nights actually had a scale in the bathroom, which I liked very much, at the same time I didn't believe it one bit.  On Saturday morning, it had me at 156.4, and on Sunday at 157.6.  Granted, I didn't eat anything on Friday but a bag of potato chips and some mixed nuts (and had no leg cramps that night, for what that's worth), but I don't honestly think the effect was that profound.  We'll see in the morning.  I did pretty well - as usual, I had a hard time eating obvious carbs, although I'm quite sure I was up a bit what with restaurants and all.  And Sunday morning I did have a Naked Juice serving (that's half a bottle) at a place we went that didn't serve tea.  Something like 29 grams of carbohydrate, mostly sugars, in that half-bottle.  Yikes.  

Drank a lot of water all weekend - to counteract the effects of moving furniture into a second-floor apartment in 110 degree heat.  I only had one lower leg-cramp incident, and that was around 5 this morning when I stretched injudiciously - and it was my ankle, not my calf.  My right hamstrings (I think; could have been an IT band thing) went a bit wonky on Saturday night, but in their defense, that was the day with most of the vertical climbs.  So hard to say if it was to do with potassium.  In any event, I was allowed to sleep pretty well, despite staying fairly low-carb all weekend - or not going much beyond the usual parameters.

Today I ate breakfast only.  It was an omelette called "The Bird" at the Breakfast Club in Scottsdale, and it was bigger than my head, stuffed with turkey, mushrooms, avocados, and boursin.  And a side of bacon.  I got about 3/5 of the way through the omelette before crying "uncle".  But I didn't want lunch at all, and only wanted some cheese and dried strawberries this evening.  

No telling what tomorrow will bring - after all, that was a different scale, and they don't all read the same.  Good weekend, though - on all fronts.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Other things I meant to mention

Body Fat % today is at 28.1, based on the tape measure.  That and my weight combined would have me go to 142 for 20%, but if I only want to go to 25% (starting to think 20% might be pretty unflatteringly skinny), that's just 151.  Oh, so doable. (Shoot, 142 is oh, so doable, really).

Also, despite the pretzel-leg and being awake for a couple of hours after, I do feel much better than I did yesterday.  And I didn't get around to eating breakfast, so I guess I'm fasting, for a while at least.  We'll see how things go around lunchtime.

August 13th

158.6.  Whatever.  Despite adding fat/carb calories at dinner (a boatload of cheddar and 2 hotdogs) and taking 4 potassium gluconates during the period between dinner and bedtime, I still got propelled out of bed shortly after midnight by my left leg trying to twist itself into a pretzel.  While I was dreaming about teaching someone to make turkey gravy, to boot - when you wake that abruptly, sometimes you bring your dream with you.  Took forever to get back to sleep after that, but I did, and it didn't bother me again.  I got a glass of water at some point (and a TJ's dark chocolate almond), and once I got the leg calmed down I was able to sleep and it didn't do it again, so I don't feel quite so wrung out as I did yesterday.  But I really would like it to stop - especially if it's not signaling some actual weight loss.  I'm starting to think maybe I should try drinking a full glass of water just before bedtime, because if the potassium isn't doing anything, maybe I'm dehydrating myself to keep the salt in balance or something.  And dehydration certainly causes cramping.  If all else fails, I may start working on reducing my salt intake - I do rely a lot on salty convenience items like hot dogs and turkey bacon and jerky and cheese, and maybe it's just too much.

Anyway - I've been noticing something since I started on this odyssey.  Americans are getting so unbelievably fat.  There are skinny people around, and some that could be termed thin, but even some of the thin people have a gut on them (as I did 4 months ago - and while I don't think I was thin then, one of Biz' friends was shocked that I thought I needed to lose weight, so in the current world, I guess I sort of qualified).  That's the common denominator: the gut.  And from everything I've read and seen for myself, it's the result of consuming simple carbohydrates, which modern food manufacturers are still using in bucketsful to substitute for fat in their low-fat fake imitation food substances.  And because of the ever-damned Lipid Hypothesis, the public continues to hoover up low-fat fake imitation food substances in the belief that they're healthy and will help with weight loss.  Instead, they can no longer see their knees without contortion, and it keeps getting worse.

I honestly don't know how we will ever overthrow the Lipid Hypothesis; it's practically part of Americans' DNA anymore.  It shows up in very casual conversations and off-hand remarks all the time.  I know when I started eating this way, it felt very uncomfortable to be adding fat to food and avoiding "healthy whole grains".  My n=1 experiment has satisfied me that this is the right way to go - for me, definitely, but even with a few studies starting to surface that support a shift to this way of eating, there is just nothing out there to help the average joe who just can't overcome the embedded belief that "the fat you eat is the fat you wear" or that saturated fat is indeed "artery-clogging".  So Americans keep eating the imitation low-fat "food" and every year, find themselves looking more and more like the humans in the (unbelievably creepy) movie "Wall-E".  Or Weebles - except when Americans wobble, I imagine they will fall down.  And these days, the wobbliness has to do with high blood glucose levels brought on by diet-induced type II diabetes. 

I have to work hard to resist the compulsion to grab total strangers sporting "the gut" and beg them to stop eating sugar and flour and imitation low-fat foods.  Because they're all starting to look to me like they're in deadly peril.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

August 12th

Bad night - exploding leg muscles yet again.  But I lost another pound, so I'm at 158.  Still, to be up walking around at 2 am because both my shin muscle and calf muscle on the same leg had cramped had me questioning my overall sanity a bit.  The nasty cramps still seem to be focused on my left leg for some reason, although I did feel some muscle "clenching" in my right calf, and both of them spent the wee hours twitching.  Or something - it feels like bubbles growing and breaking, and it's not tremendously apparent from the outside if I put my hand on the muscles doing it.

So I'm at kind of a crossroads, these days, I guess.  I can continue the hard-core low carb eating until I get into the 140s and suffer through the nights, or I can add some potatoes or carrots or rice and risk stopping the weight loss altogether (I actually don't know what will happen; I know that it causes water retention, which stops the potassium leaching, which stops the cramps).  I'm not sure what I want to do - I hated being stalled at 162.2 (a number that will live in infamy, I think), and I like that the dam appears to have broken for a while.  But the broken sleep is definitely painful - in more ways than one.

I think I'd better let things lay for the weekend at least.  We're out of town to Phoenix, moving Biz back to school, so eating may be a bit peculiar and driven by factors other than health.  And when we get back, I can put some thought to the way forward, and maybe even try adding some starchy veg back over an entire week to see what happens.  I do feel like I have the luxury now to take a week to experiment a bit; I wouldn't have dared to do this back in April.  On the other hand, in April, I wasn't leaping out of a sound sleep in acute pain multiple times per night, either.

If I had the energy, I'd do the happy dance about being at 158.  This is equal to the lowest weight I've been at in 21 years.  Woo.  also Hoo.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Chilling

Saw someone recommend this as an eye-opener on the PaNu forum.  It's creepy to watch over time.  And I live in Colorado, and from observation, I'd guess we're about out of the 15-19% world too.


August 11th

Fasting worked, and I'm now down to 159.0.  Hopefully I can keep a chain of loss going for a while without a stall, because weirdly enough, I'm mentally less on-game about the next 16 pounds than I was about the previous 32 and some.  160 was my original goal, and is a weight I've been at or above for a long time, so setting a new goal and heading below that, with the intent of staying in the lower zone for the rest of my life feels sort of, well, extra.  Not that I'm changing how I eat, or even wanting to.  I wish I could describe it better, but at the moment, I'm not even sure I recognize or understand it completely.  Maybe it's something about seeing my arms in the mirror and realizing that they're thin, or being able to feel my actual hip bones through my butt (it's not a bony butt, not even, but there was a LOT in the way of it before). In any event, I'm still losing and intend to keep losing and eating in a way that the world thinks is unhealthy, and confounding my doctors with the results of any tests they run.  Nyahh. 

Next thing to tackle, somehow, is strength.  I still feel fairly weak these days, despite the visible muscle definition, so I need to figure out what that's all about.  And make it stop.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

August 10th

159.8 again this morning, thanks to a return to proper eating.  And, for what it's worth (and I think it won't last), despite having taken only 2 potassium yesterday morning at breakfast, I didn't have any cramps overnight.  Around 4 am, I felt a mild clenching sensation in my left calf, but it stopped right away.  Yesterday I was back at the 2 eggs/2 turkey bacon for breakfast and a reasonable, low-carb dinner (no potatoes or breading), and the weight of the weekend revealed itself to have been all water, I think.  No surprise really.

Anyway, before I knew I'd be back down, I'd committed to an IF day today, so no breakfast or lunch for me.  No worries, really.  I'm tired right now (cannot stop waking up at 3 am, and this morning, before I'd woken fully, Lee, who was awake, decided to pat me on the shoulder and that pretty much completed the process; other wise I might have got back to sleep right away), but not hungry.

One nice side effect of the weight loss is that I realize that I can go buy flattering clothing again.  While overweight, I kept buying the same styles I'd bought as a thin person, and could not figure out what was going wrong, but they generally looked just awful.  Nothing like a little visceral fat to wreck the line of, ... well, everything, pretty much.  So I'm doing some prospecting at the moment, to see what's available, and may even do some sewing this fall.  Kinda fun.

Monday, August 9, 2010

August 9th

Well, I went the whole weekend without leg cramps and - I think - am caught up on my sleep again.  Which is probably a good thing, because I'm now back to 161 (thank heaven the stupid scale didn't read 162.2 this morning or I'd have been in serious despair).  I was up Friday, then down Saturday morning to 160 even, then up to 160.4 yesterday and 161 this morning.  Fairly carb-y weekend.  Last night I had Olive Garden chicken (I confess I am drawing a blank on the dish name; maybe I still need more sleep - marsala!) and it turned out to be breaded.  Served with potatoes: I had a few.  Saturday we went to La Loma and I had chips and salsa and guac and enchiladas with green chile and it was beyond wonderful; worth every ounce.  So now that we're back to a semi-routine week, I should be able to get back on track.  And if it turns out that weight loss means having to put up with leg cramps for a while, so be it.

One fun activity this weekend though - I took in both my new skirts.  Two inches each around the waist, and lengthened the darts that were already there.  They fit much better now, and wearing them with a belt will be much less of a pain (I was having to keep it on the loosest notch, and even then it was smaller around than the waistband).  They also look better; they were a bit unflattering before.

Friday, August 6, 2010

I meant to do that

I gained about a pound yesterday - up to 160.8 this morning.  Sort of on purpose.  For dinner, I had 3 bratwurst (that in itself shouldn't have done anything except increase my energy levels - and it did) and some pork-and-beans, specifically for the carbs.  And a bit over 2 glasses of wine.  The latter two items were in an attempt to keep the potassium up enough (by not shedding water) that I could get a full night's sleep - and it worked, so I'm cool with the side effect.  If I have to carry about a pound of water around in order to keep from flushing potassium out every night, I will.  Anyway, I'm going to add a few carbs back in (not sure what, though) at dinner to see if that will help with the cramps but allow the weight loss to continue.  The unbroken sleep was so worth it.

I also had lunch yesterday - a Subway roast beef salad.  Didn't help my energy levels at all in the afternoon, and served to make me hungry at dinner.  Not worth repeating - at least, not that particular lunch.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Muffled painful groans, interrupted by yawning

I am tired - at least, I think that's what it is.  The leg - my left leg, which seems to be the usual culprit - had me out of bed three times last night, I think, and not in a subtle way any of them.  The first one was around 10:30, the next an hour later, and the last at 4:30, which was really dirty pool, if you ask me - one hour before the alarm was to go off.  And I spent the hour rolling carefully from side to side, trying to get back to sleep without the full body, scalp-to-toes stretch that I desperately needed, and that would have turned my damned left leg into a snarl akin to badly cast fishing line.  So when I did get up, I was a limp rag, barely able to function.  My back hurts and I have no strength.

That said, I did lose one-fifth of a pound, so I'm at 159.6 this morning. And after a Mexican dinner, that's definitely in the "could be worse" category.  Because we ate the chips, and I had some refried beans and rice as well.  And I remembered (don't think I can say discovered) that chile rellenos can come "soft," basically wrapped in an omelette, rather than crispy, which involves won-ton wrappers.  So I had some that way - and they were pretty good (I still prefer crispy).  I wish the chips had been enough carbs to keep me from leaching potassium, though.

I think I'm going to increase my calories for a while - I guess by having 3 meals instead of two.  I know I'm not eating a huge amount and I think my energy level is down as a result.

One other thing.  I read through all the past posts here yesterday, and about every third one is bemoaning a possible stall or setback.  Yet I've lost 31.8 pounds since Easter, stalls and setbacks included.  So maybe I should stop whining about the rate of progress and just talk about what I'm doing and the related effects. 

Yeah, that'll happen.  Until I stay put at one weight for more than 2 days...

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

August 4th - a Milestone

Back a while, when I found the LoseIt app for my phone, I set up a goal in the app to lose weight until I weighed 160 pounds.  It's been tracking me, as often as I would enter a weight in it, since then - and I think it's been nearly a year since I started.  Well, this morning, I reached my goal - the scale read 159.8 pounds!

I'm not where I need to be yet - as I said yesterday, that's looking more and more like 143 - but in the near term, I have not weighed this little in over 10 years (and that was a 1 day blip where I believe I hit 158), and in the longer term, the last time I weighed this little for any length of time, I was pregnant with a child who will be turning 21 in a few months.  After she was born, I settled at about 160 and stayed there or higher ever since.  So not only is this a milestone, but it's practically uncharted territory.

I think the standard reaction of someone "on a diet" who hits a goal is to go out and eat cake - or some forbidden food - to celebrate.  I have no desire to do that.  Not because I have a new goal or anything, but because I (knock wood) have apparently overcome my addiction to most of the food I've stopped eating.  I hope it's not illusory and that this time next year I will not be moaning and weeping because one Christmas cookie started some sort of avalanche of pounds all over again.  For now, I will accept it as a gift, and enjoy it.  And I'll be very careful with the Christmas cookies...

(I won't spoil the mood by going into details, but it's a damn good thing I was down this morning, because my left leg went off like a bomb at intervals of about 1-1/2 hours all night.  Working my way away from potassium leaching will probably be the hardest thing once I get closer to my normal weight, whatever that turns out to be.)

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

August 3rd

At Last!!!  I have officially lost over 30 pounds as of this morning.  161.0, said the scale.  And to top it off, I did my bodyfat measurements this morning and it said 29.3% - but some of the numbers on the tape measure were a bit cattywampus, so I may redo that at a time I'm less sleep-fogged; my neck seems to have got thicker and that doesn't seem likely somehow.

The four pair of size 16 pants I was able to reclaim from the back closet are now looking too big on me - in fact, when I caught my reflection in the elevator this morning, they actually are starting to look unflatteringly baggy.  Bother.  I think I'll hold off for a while; I'm sort of figuring that I'll end up at either a 12 or 14 and just maybe I can wear these until that's resolved.

20% bodyfat has me aiming at 143 pounds, which, given my loss to date, seems utterly doable (although a few more 2-week stalls and I may see it differently!).  But, you know, just having shed the first 30 is so infinitely satisfying - and fitting into clothes and having them look flattering on me in the same way they flattered the hanger (I never thought of myself as fat, but I should have just by observing how bad formerly-flattering styles looked on me) - it's good.

The paper reported on a 2-year study this morning, that indicates that low-carb is beneficial to blood lipids.  Well, duh.  I can provide witness to that one.  Nice to see it the day after the "body docs" column was advising everyone to eat a plant-based diet going light on the meat and avoiding that all-time poison, saturated fat.  To them, I raise a toast composed entirely of bacon fat and butter - "you guys should quit and go back to school!"  Seriously, they get something fundamental very very wrong (based on what I've been reading) every week, which is scary since they're messing with the health of millions of Oprah viewers.

Anyway, I'm doing the Happy Dance today!  Woo Hoo!

Monday, August 2, 2010

August 2nd - Stall, stall, stall....

My scale hates me.

Never mind that it's a good thing that I gained no weight while on business - and it is.  Never mind that I did briefly see a lower number yesterday morning.  If I get on that demented piece of electronics one more day and have it flash (sneeringly) 162.2 at me, I will scream!

It was 161.8 yesterday and while it was settling on that, I even saw it flash a number that started out 15, so hope is not dead.  And I did eat chinese for dinner - meat and veg and hot-and-sour soup only - which had a bad effect the last time I did it.  And I'm still swollen up from muscle strain a bit (the massage yesterday helped a lot, but not as much as I'd hoped), and it's that time of the month. 

So, back to the daily routine.  We will get there eventually, just not as quickly as I would prefer.  And I'm not at all sure where "there" will end up being.