Tuesday

If I am doing the math correctly, I completed a fast of just over 30 hours yesterday afternoon, when I finally got a few hunger pangs and felt it was safe to eat.  It was a complete breeze (possibly aided by illness, I admit, but still easy).  Funnily enough, one of my colleagues at work was fasting prior to surgery yesterday, sucking down Gatorade and apparently struggling hard with starvation.  I didn't tell him - it didn't seem fair - and I tend to think people would look at me as some sort of freak for doing IF anyway.

The fast was of no help with weight loss - not that I am trying to lose any more weight - I was at 148.0 this morning.  No idea why, and I don't really care much.  If I spend the rest of my life at 150 or slightly below, I will be a healthy and happy camper.  And that's all I really care about.

Back to the Grind - Monday

Thanksgiving was lovely - sunny, low-mid 60s, relaxing.  We ate well.  And on the trip back, got a case of some sort of food poisoning.  Nasty stomach ache all day yesterday and lingering into this morning, although a dose of liquid Pepto-Bismol seems to be helping.  The upshot?  I've been fasting, with the exception of 2 chocolate-covered peanuts, a can of diet Red Bull, and some Rolaids, since breakfast yesterday (I ate some scrambled eggs in order to take some Advil).  I'm not hungry now, and food is still not very appetizing, so I guess I'll fast until dinner tonight.

So, let's see.  We had several breakfasts of scrambled eggs and meat (most of them fell into that category, actually), I don't think I ate lunch at all, Thanksgiving dinner was as described in the previous entry (fresh turkey cooked unstuffed with butter poured under the breast skin came out perfect), and I had a small popcorn when we went to see the Harry Potter movie (it is amazing to me how that seems like plenty now - I used to finish a large popcorn routinely, although I don't believe I ever did a refill).  Weight this morning was 147.4, so I didn't gain a thing over the holiday weekend, even with the pie and potatoes and stuffing.

Lee is now asking me if I'm done losing weight.  I'm not sure what he's asking - hopefully it's just a question of wardrobe replacement being done, rather than "are you going to go back to eating pasta and cookies now?", because the answer to the latter is "Hell, no!"

T (for Thanksgiving) minus two days

My one meal yesterday consisted of pot roast, potatoes and carrots, salad, and a bit of gravy.  Followed by the last of the low-carb, no-gluten cheesecake.  And some bits of cheese and chocolate.  Weird how that last sentence appears in a lot of my eating-log entries.  I do eat low-carb, but not very clean from a paleo standpoint, I think.  I should be snacking on berries or something - or not snacking at all (better plan - but it's an old habit!)

147.8 this morning - still working off the weekend's excesses.  I had a bunch of turkey sausage links for breakfast, after looking into their fat-protein-carb ratios and realizing that they're pretty similar to eggs.  I figure they'll hold me until I can grab something at the airport this afternoon.

Thanksgiving plans include turkey (of course), corn-bread stuffing, mashed potatoes with rice-flour-roux gravy, and no-holds-barred pumpkin pie (I cannot bring myself to screw with the Cooks Illustrated fool-proof pie crust, so we're biting the bullet on that one).  Probably some other vegetable or a salad in there somewhere.  So I'll probably come out of it up a pound or two, and have to knuckle down to make them go away afterward.  The nice thing is that I know now how to make them go away afterward.

Monday before Thanksgiving

Nutritionally, kind of an ugh weekend.  And, apparently, nearly a lost one - perhaps that's related.  In any event, I can't remember whether it was Friday or Saturday that I got the munchies for carbs, sort of, and ended up with Grandma Smith's chile (made it with way too much onion!) for dinner, followed by a bag of microwave popcorn covered with ersatz butter-flavored stuff.  I think that was Saturday, which means that on Friday I had Mexican for dinner - cheese enchiladas smothered in green chile.  Phew - I hate it when I can't remember things.

Yesterday was better - I woke up with the taste of onions in my mouth (definitely had the chile on Saturday) and skipped breakfast because I couldn't think of anything that would make that taste go away.  Had 3 hotdogs for lunch, and various bits of cheese or nuts as snacks.  Fed Mom and Dad for dinner, which was flank steak with a red wine/stock reduction sauce, butternut squash with blue cheese and pecans, a salad, and some experimental gluten free amaretto cheese cake for dessert.  The experiment was a success - ground almonds, sugar (only a little) and butter make a perfectly acceptable cheesecake crust, and the cheesecake recipe (which I reduced the sugar component of, and had some cornstarch in it) was really good.  I have a leftover piece that will be part of my dinner tonight, probably along with leftover flank steak and maybe some leftover turkey.

I am at 148.0 this morning - no surprise after some of that eating, and also no surprise given cyclical events.  I'm fasting today because I woke up with a stomach that basically told me not to eat - and I've learned to listen.

One other thing - apparently my rather snotty excursus on the salt water about a week ago has caused at least my parents to re-think it; it sounds like they probably won't be re-ordering it, I'm glad to hear.

Friday

Broke yesterday's fast with meat from one of those convenience deli roast turkey breast things at the grocery store (good stuff) and gravy made with a roux of butter and sweet white rice flour.  Much more gravy-like than the potato starch option, although the thickening properties again appear to way outpace wheat flour.  Tasted good and the texture was about right - maybe not as silky smooth as a flour-based roux, but perfectly acceptable.  So that's what we'll be using at Thanksgiving.

The fast has not completely settled my stomach, it appears this morning.  Bother.  I'm not sure what I got into, but I figure I'll keep eating pretty clean and it'll go away eventually - and if it doesn't, I'll call the doctor.  I had some more turkey for breakfast - cold with salt and pepper, essentially the middle of a post-Thanksgiving breakfast turkey sandwich.  It was very lean and the skin was roasted to unchewability, so I don't know how long it will last this morning.

Down to 145.8 this morning - not intentionally.  One day I'll track my caloric intake and see if maybe I'm eating way too little or something.  In addition to turkey and gravy yesterday, I had some chocolate almonds and some Kerrygold cheese and some cheese spread on pecans, none of which is low-calorie or low-fat.  On the other hand, all my day's eating did take place between 6 and 9 pm, so the overall quantity had to be somewhat constrained.  I eat when I'm hungry (unless deliberately fasting) and I eat until I'm not hungry - seems like the right thing to do as maintenance.

Thought about buying some strawberries last night, but absolutely none of them had any fragrance, meaning that they'd taste like nothing without added sugar.  So I didn't.

Thursday

Had quite a dinner last night - a burger topped with melted swiss, bacon (pre-cooked bacon crisps up pretty well on the cold side of a 2-level gas grill), and the remains of the guacamole I bought last week, which stayed surprisingly un-oxidized in just a plastic tub with a lid.  I am not entirely sure I'd do that again; the guac is always spicier than I expect and sort of negates the bacon and swiss - maybe just sliced or mashed avocado would be better with those two.  Nonetheless, it was pretty good.  I also had some leftover mashed potatoes (BOB Evans, not Dave, by the way) - and so did the dogs; the leftovers were bigger than I'd remembered.  But I had the munchies last night, and ended up committing a venial dietary sin: I ate two very stale Girl Scout Samoas.  And they weren't bad.  After that, I didn't want any more, and will probably dispose of the remains in the trash on Monday - they're so stale that they're all stuck together in stacks; two was the smallest stack, or I'd have had only one.

So far, my sin has not caught up with me (and 2 cookies had only 18 grams of carbs, so really, they weren't that bad - but they did have flour).  I was still 146.4 this morning.  I am, however fasting today; my stomach has not taken kindly to something I've eaten since the beginning of the week and I would like to let it rest a bit.

The trash company is collecting non-perishable food through much of the next month, which is a bit of a quandary.  So much of non-perishable food is carb-heavy, and I'd rather not poison the poor.  Tuna comes to mind, and maybe canned beef stew, things like that.  I plan on doing some shopping toward that food drive this weekend and hope to find some alternatives that are healthier than pasta-based stuff-in-boxes.

Wednesday

Well, that was a revelation.  Over the weekend, I'd done the waist and hip measurements for body fat percentage, and it came out at 24.2% - below my "good enough" goal of 25%.  Last night I had a massage (this does link up), and was laying there (what else is there to do in a massage?) trying to work out what 24.2% fat meant my lean body mass was - and I came close, at 111-112 pounds.  This morning, I thought I check to see how much lean mass I'd lost in all this eating, and dragged out a spreadsheet I'd been keeping my measurements in over the summer.  A quick calculation, and now I know.  In June, when I first did the measurements, I had a lean body mass of 111.45 pounds.  Today, I have a lean body mass of 111.27 pounds.  So that means that I've lost, in the past 5 months, something slightly less than 1/5 of a pound of lean body mass.  That's astonishing.

Oh, one other milestone passed this morning, even though I wasn't aiming for it - as of today, I have lost exactly 45 pounds from when I got fed up with my weight after the cruise in April.  I am at 146.4 this morning.  And based on the body fat calculations, every last one of those 45 pounds was fat.  

Every. Last. One.