Tuesday

Huh.  Nothing much to share today, really.  Sleep continues to be challenging, and I'm blaming it all on hormone swings - I'm having warm flashes - nothing like the horrors from last spring, thank heaven - and they're making it hard to maintain a normal body temperature.  Sometimes they feel more like cold flashes, actually.  Anyway, I find myself partly awake about twice during the night - this morning, the second stint was at 4:30, which basically meant I was up for the day.  Despite that, and maybe because of the hormone swings as well, I'm losing weight in a mild sort of way.  142.8 this morning by the new scale. I think the only thing I've changed from a few weeks back when I was seeing 147 rather regularly is a mild downturn in my sugar consumption.  And that could certainly account for it - I find eating sugar reinforces itself, and I spiral upward rather quickly.  I've also cut way back on nuts - not consciously; it just happened.  Maybe now that Fall is turning into Winter, I am not storing energy for the long sleep anymore?  I looked at my records from last year, and it appears that the losses in October and November slowed down significantly - in August and September, I lost just over 6 pounds a month, in October, it was 4, and in November, 2.  Between November and February, I know I lost another 5-1/2 pounds, but I didn't chart my weight after mid-November.  Nonetheless, an interesting trend, and somewhat supportive of my theory that insulin-based fat storage enabled us to survive Winter by turning all of the ripe Fall fruit into fat.

Meanwhile, here's yesterday's eating:

• scrambled eggs
• bacon
• tea with cream
• Monday's usual supplements
• almonds
• dark chocolate with almonds (I bought some fundraising candybars last week and am eating them very slowly - this was one or two segments of a 4-part bar)
• chile (no beans - yeah, Chili's!)
• salad with blue cheese dressing
• iced tea
• french fries with ketchup (probably fewer than 10)
• two chocolate almonds
• one almond paleo "cookie"

I think that was it.  It seemed pretty carby at the time, but I did have a few feints at leg cramps overnight, so it probably wasn't.  And I'm down another one-fifth of a pound this morning, as well.  Got some cheese with me, so I may be able to avoid the chocolate bars today.

By the way, Gary Taubes finished his series on the Food Reward Hypothesis, here.  I'm no scientist, but he makes a very convincing argument that Guyenet has not proved much of anything.  Guyenet's response seemed peevish at best ("he's cherry-picking my cited studies, and has a book to sell!") - I found it hard to read, and I can't make his definition of "reward" anything but circular - a food is "rewarding" if it makes you eat more of it, so by definition, since the obese folks in one of the studies they contended over ate less of the liquid diet, it was therefore not rewarding, even if it was a source of significant sugar - more than a Coke - and (theoretically) tasted sweet.  Before I can buy the whole reward argument as valid, I would need a definition of reward that could be applied to a food without watching people eat it.  Oh, and could someone explain to me why, if the liquid diet was very unrewarding to the obese folks, the normal weight folks didn't slack up in their consumption of it?  Wouldn't they have found it unrewarding too, if it was fundamentally unrewarding?  Supposedly, this dialogue is finished (it shouldn't be - this is science, dammit!), but I'll keep an eye out for new developments.