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.
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