Friday

Still swollen.  I tried an epsom salts bath last night, but nothing. 158.8 again today, and sore and bulgy in places like ankles. Here's yesterday (nothing to brag about):

• tea with cream
  
• scrambled eggs
  
• turkey sausage
  
• the usual supplements
  
• Jimmy John's unwich with turkey, bacon, and cheese
  
• a bag of potato chips
  
• another bag of potato chips
  
• cheese
  
• 3 Fuzzy's ground beef tacos, no tortillas
  
• 1 tsp honey
  

Obviously, I chose to eat the potato chips - both involved effort; they weren't just sitting around. They tasted quite good. I don't know why I felt I needed them, but I did. 

Sleep last night was interrupted by the dog again - same scenario, but at 1:45 rather than 4, so my sleep was worse. I still feel like I'm getting rest, but I'm so tired right now it's not at all funny.

Thursday

Whatever is wrong with me is still wrong; I woke up this morning aching from head to toe and weighing more than yesterday - 158.8 this morning. I guess I should be grateful that the rate of increase has dropped. My shoes don't fit, and I'm all wobbly when I move and have no strength - and as mentioned above, I hurt all over. Hormones? It's not unlike my cruise issues, when I made the mistake of taking birth control to delay my period and ended up with cankles - although my legs aren't that swollen this time. So maybe. Is this my "Paleo Cold", to match the SAD ones that Lee and Elizabeth have? Possibly. The fact that I'm not getting sick is one thing that keeps me from doing anything stupid.

Here's yesterday:

• tea with cream
  
• 3 turkey sausage links
  
• 1/2 cup of sauerkraut
  
• salad with ham, turkey, swiss, and ranch dressing (about 2 TBSP)
  
• 1 tsp coconut oil (to drive home on - I was tired)
  
• a 1/4-lb beef burger (omaha steaks)
  
• a zucchini
  
• parmesan sauce (3T butter, about 1/3 cup sour cream, 1/3 cup parmesan cheese)
  
• 10 chocolate covered coconut almonds
  
• 1 tsp honey
  

The reason for all the precision above is that I want to check the nutrition values on my day's eating. So, the total worked out to be 160g fat (71%), 46g carbs (9%, but too high in general), 101g protein (20%). I should have ditched the candy - or stuck with the original 5 pieces instead of going back for more. Not sure why, but I was negative for ketones at bedtime.

I did something rather helpful last night - rather than listen to talk radio all the way home, I switched to light classical music, to see if that reduced the stress of the drive. I think it did; did it a bit again this morning. It did seem to help me avoid gorging on nuts, and I don't think the go-back on the chocolate almonds was a compulsive move.

Sleep last night was not great - we are dog sitting and the sit-ee decided he wanted out of his kennel and onto our bed at 4 am. I'd slept thoroughly until that point, so it wasn't a big issue, but I went back to hard sleep afterwards, and had an awful time waking up. Not sure I'm awake yet.

Wednesday

I would love to give up about now, buy some muumuus, and settle down to life as a fat person, but I won't. Nonetheless, I am very frustrated. I gained more weight last night - another 1.4 pounds. The current scale says I weigh 158.6. It may be right - I don't know. What I do know is that I am not in control of things right now, and I have not been able to get control since last Fall.

Here's yesterday:

• tea with cream
  
• tea with coconut oil
  
• olives
  
• 1/2 lb shredded pork BBQ with a sweet sauce
  
• cole slaw
  
• cheese - about 6 pieces, I think
  
• mixed nuts, eaten almost compulsively, just to chew something
  
• a chocolate praline
  
• 1 tsp honey
  

Yesterday was a fat fast, and, in theory, should have left me in a fat-burning state. It might have, if I hadn't decided to eat the praline. And I will admit that the praline was delicious. And I will further admit that adding 26 grams of carbs to yesterday's consumption SHOULD NOT have had the effect of making me bloated and nasty overnight. But it did. Something is wrong, and I don't know what it is. What I do know is that all I can do right now is eat as healthy as I can manage, try to control my stress, which is at a higher level lately than it has been in some time, and sleep.

I told Lee this morning that I will take the next reasonable opportunity to change jobs to one closer to home; wasting 2 hours a day in my car is no way to spend life, and when I get home at night, I have no energy or interest in anything but eating and sitting like a lump on the couch.

The compulsive snacking is a real problem for me right now. I think I could replace it with another equally bad habit if I could think of one, but it feels like I need to be doing something in that rhythmic way, and right now, I'm rhythmically inserting nuts into my mouth and chewing on them.

Tuesday

I had to replace the batteries in the scale this morning, and after that was done and I re-zeroed the scale, it read 157.2.  Before the re-zeroing, it read something like 167. So I don't know that I trust it. I am feeling quite a bit less swollen today, thankfully, so if anything, I think I'd show up as lighter than yesterday. I am not going to recognize that number as "official" weight, I guess. Although it may form a new baseline - hard to say. 

I'm listening to the presentations out of Paleohacks' PaleoCon this week; last night, one on intermittent fasting that recognized a Fat Fast as legit. Cool. Since we are experiencing bad driving weather (which is to say, brilliant sun, 7 degrees, and about an inch of snow from last night - but the combo added a solid half-hour to my drive to work this morning), I didn't eat breakfast, and I brought some lumps of coconut oil to work to add to my tea, and some olives.  I think I will declare today a fat fast and not eat until dinner, except for the oil and olives. Another point in the presentation was that IF doesn't always serve women well, but referred specifically to women of childbearing years - and I'm not one of them, so I'm hoping to reap the benefits of autophagy and possibly having my energy source shift harder toward fat. 

I will be n=1ing a couple of things between now and leaving on 2/19 for Mardi Gras: more fat fasts, using cream cheese, copious cream in my morning tea (i.e., 1/4 cup), macadamia nuts, and the lovely broccoli cheese soup from the Fat Fast cookbook. Maybe 3-5 days of that toward the end of the period. The other trial will be LCHF with nearly all carbs from leaves, to try to get my gut bacteria rebalanced after the stupid foray into resistant starch. Still bitterly regretting that.

Here's yesterday:

• tea with cream
  
• no supplements (another thing I need to get back on top of)
  
• three turkey sausage links
  
• gumbo soup with chicken and andouille
  
• a tangerine
  
• a bag of peanuts (fault of the stupid tangerine, I think - I got hungry at 3)
  
• cheese (cheddar and swiss - probably about 8 oz)
  
• salami - about 8 thin slices
  
• 1/4 large bar of Hershey's special dark with almonds
  
• about 1/2 cup sauerkraut
  
• 1 tsp honey
  

So minimal veg yesterday, and not a lot of fat either. Sleep remained very dialed in, although my Sleep Cycle captured Lee's getting up several times to blow his nose and called it one of my less good nights of sleep.  I felt great when I woke up at 5. For the first time. I will take that every time, thanks. So I'm glad that's better, in any event.

Oh - and tea with coconut oil in it is quite palatable - way better than I'd feared.

Monday

156.0 today, still bloated and sore; here's yesterday:

• tea with cream
  
• the usual supplements
  
• omelet with ham, cheese, and tomatoes
  
• about 3 bites of hash browns
  
• cheese
  
• chocolate - 4 squares of 70% cacao
  
• steak
  
• salad
  
• commercial ranch dressing
  
• roasted broccoli
  
• ice cream - 1 scoop of vanilla
  
• 1 chocolate cookie - unknown ingredients, but wheat for sure
  
• 1 tsp honey
  

I lost a lot of the water over the weekend, and I do feel better today than I did Friday, but not fully well. Annoying, to say the least. The weekend was not terribly active; I did a bit of puttering, but didn't exercise. Frankly, I felt like a steaming pile of shit on Saturday, so I spent the weekend drinking tea and trying to make it stop feeling like that.

Something is out of balance. My plan to repair it is faltering - I haven't been able to get into a groove regarding increased vegetables yet, although I made a gumbo-style soup on Friday from frozen okra and the Cajun trinity and tomatoes (and chicken and Andouille sausage) that was quite tasty. In any event, I'm not overeating, and I am retaining water like crazy. I'm going to re-read the fat fast high-fat recipes, looking for the big guns and try to incorporate more fat in the diet this week. That's the main goal.

Sleep is going well.  Last night registered not as deep as it felt, but that may be because Lee was starting a cold and sneezing explosively as we were falling asleep. After I fell asleep, though, he could have let off a bomb in the room and I don't think I would have known it - I didn't wake up at all until 4 am, which is so awesome. Getting that dialed in is a huge improvement to life right now. I will say that I'm not having hot flashes at the moment, and that's part of it for sure.

Onward. Step 1 is getting to a state of not feeling like shit.

Friday

There's a Twitter abbreviation, FFS.  I'm pretty sure it fits my mood this morning. I stepped on the scale at 158.0 again. I'm constipated as all get-out, so I know it's the lingering aftereffects of the resistant starch in the plantains, but I don't want to see that number on the scale; I'm eating reasonably well, with discipline, and it's hard not to see it rewarded. Ugh.

Here's yesterday:

• turkey sausage
  
• tea with cream
  
• no supplements - left early due to the snowstorm
  
• tangerine
  
• salami (way more than I usually eat)
  
• cheese
  
• caesar salad, no croutons
  
• 6 oz sirloin topped with butter
  
• Southern-style green beans
  
• a glass of riesling
  
• dark chocolate with almonds - 2 squares' worth
  
• pork rinds
  
• 1 tsp honey
  

That was it. We ate out, and when we got back, I had a horrid case of the munchies, leading to the pork rinds and chocolate (not eaten together). I kept some space between eating that and the honey, and slept pretty well.

I'm not fasting today, but I'm going to focus on fat between now and dinner; really ramp it up. Then we will be having a chicken-andouille gumbo soup for dinner, with salad, to get a lot of veg. And at some point, I hope to get my digestive system, er, emptied out.

Weekend plans include another long walk outside - it's supposed to be in the 60's again. And trying to get things back on track. Very discouraging at the moment.

Thursday

I think the pattern of avoiding fat after dinner and taking the teaspoon of honey just before bedtime is a good one - another pretty good night's sleep, despite the efforts of our cat to wake me up. She walks all over the bed at night, and while it rouses me a bit, I am generally able to get back to deep sleep pretty quickly. So that's good.

Weight, not so much - but based on the aches and pains I woke with, it's water. 156.8 this morning. Annoying as hell. I have thrown the plantains away and will not do anything more with resistant starch. Here's yesterday:

• tea with cream
  
• scrambled eggs
  
• bacon
  
• the usual supplements
  
• peanuts (vending bag)
  
• mushu chicken
  
• hot and sour soup
  
• a fortune cookie
  
• a square of 85% cacao chocolate
  
• 1 tsp honey
  

I don't feel as bloated and nasty as I did yesterday, and the dizziness is gone. I'm groggy as all get-out this morning, though, due to a 2-hour commute through a 1" snowfall. The drivers here are impressive in their ability to milk every possible accident out of a tiny bit of weather. As I look out the window now, it's actually sunny. I'm sure the stress of events like this is not helpful, and I sure hope I can cut the commute back soon.