My real blog now…

I’m at dana dot net these days. I weighed in at 224 yesterday, have managed to mostly keep off the sugar soda. I would still like to do a weight-loss blog but on my own space. We’ll see how it goes.

Let’s just say I’ve learned some things about diet in the past several months that have left me re-assessing what I want to do. I still believe wholeheartedly that low-carb is the correct approach for the vast majority of people, although some folks with certain health problems (that could have been prevented with low-carb/high-fat eating) can’t do it anymore. Bad or nonexistent gallbladder, or advanced kidney disease, or just simply so unaccustomed to dietary fat that it would make them sick–even if that is not a permanent condition, it will be enough to put off most people and is the reason vegetarians have trouble converting back to a diet with animal protein in it.

At the same time I have come to believe that grain is the fruit of the Devil (not literally, but MAN is it bad for you), that beans are not much better and soy in particular is evil, and that there are several cultivated vegetables for that matter which are not so hot for you raw, and if you have to cook them to make them less bad for you, what’s the point? There ARE some veggies which are OK, and there are some fruits which are awesome, but. And “but” is a big word for being only three letters long.

Anyway, so yeah. I think there is more to proper human diet than just “cut the carbs,” and I think most low-carbers rely too heavily on processed foods because they can’t bear to part with bread, which makes about as much sense as vegetarians eating fake meat. So I want to explore what proper eating might mean, but this ain’t the place to do it. But if I decide where I want to go blogwise and what I’m going to do, I’ll mention it in my regular blog, so come along for the ride if ya wanna.

Yep, still here yet.

I thought I was going to get back on the wagon and haven’t done it yet. For what it’s worth, I’m still under 220. Last I weighed, which I think was two days ago, I was at 216. Remember, I started at 237. So this is good.

Sort of related to low-carbing, I have been reading some very interesting stuff about agriculture, and some of the latest thinking about why we adopted agriculture wholesale even though it did not lead to overall better health, a more peaceful society, etc.–in short, why’d we pick something up that was so maladaptive?

The thinking among some mavericks is that there are substances in cereal crops in particular which behave like endorphins do in the human body, only they come from outside the body so they are called “exorphins.” Basically, the gist is that we developed cereal agriculture and made such a huge cult and social transformation out of it because we’re addicted to grain. The other major crop we developed around the time we were beginning to farm grains was opium poppy, if that tells you anything.

For more, read here.

Meanwhile, the blog I’m keeping nowadays is here. I do not know whether I will get back on the wagon, although I’ve not gone back to sugary soda (which probably explains why I’ve kept most of my lost weight, well, lost), but if anybody randomly wants to keep up with me, that’s where you go.

Still around.

So I think I was off the diet officially for about a week and a half. Gained some weight in that time. When I got done getting it mostly out of my system I dropped my carb intake again and immediately the weight started coming off. By now I’ve lost what I regained and then some; I’m down to about 213. Very not shabby.

I know I need to restrict carb intake but am in the process of assessing whether it’s Atkins specifically that I want to follow or whether it really matters if I follow a specific plan or not. Meanwhile the weight drops off. Sometimes it ticks upward a bit for a day or two but heck, that’s natural fluctuations going on there. It’s never more than a pound or two at a time.

I’m trying to wrap my mind around having lost 24 pounds since starting this thing in July and not… quite… getting it. Maybe it will sink in better when another 24 are gone.

Still here but not restarted yet

Hello to Occasional Random Visitors. I responded to two of you in the previous post; I have no idea whether you’ll be back but you’re certainly welcome.

The last few days have been interesting. Sunday my carb intake got so high that I felt crappy at the end of the day and wanted to drink a bunch of water to flush things out. While I wasn’t thirsty, this sort of thing helps me understand a little better how thirst becomes a symptom of diabetes. Adding extra water must be a way to get rid of the extra glucose, and someone who’s diabetic and following the Standard American Diet has one heck of a lot of extra glucose!

Also, we had taken my daughter to the local science center on Sunday and just walking around through the exhibits made me really tired. I could function and go up several flights of stairs and so on, I just really did not want to be there. I wanted to go home and take a nap. After we got home and didn’t have to be vertical and mobile, I felt a little better. Not much, though. Too much grain food and too much dried fruit. Really, really dumb.

At some point–I don’t remember which night–I also had one of those weird episodes as I was sleeping where it felt like I had inhaled fluid or something. I used to get that from time to time before I started Atkins two months ago. I would also have episodes where I’d wake myself up because something was not right about my breathing. This inhaled-fluid thing was relatively mild compared to what I used to get and I haven’t had the breathing problems so far. I have also not had recurrences of heartburn (gastric reflux), which used to plague me on a fairly regular basis but went away a few weeks into Atkins. Isn’t it amazing what can go wrong when your diet’s screwed up? Some of it might have been the twenty extra pounds I lost, but I’m still quite obese, still over 200 pounds, so the weight loss is not the entire explanation, I don’t think.

I would like my energy back, and I would like to not start getting those nighttime problems again.

The other piece of it is that everything I’ve eaten that I shouldn’t have had on Atkins, I have thought seriously about it as I was eating the food and afterward, and have asked myself why I bothered. This will sound weird but to me there is a sort of “feel” to the foods I eat where some foods “feel” nutritious, and some “feel” empty. Meat, cheese, eggs, and vegetables “feel” OK to me; processed grains “feel” empty; whole grains fall somewhere in between, although closer to the empty end of the spectrum. There isn’t a single nutrient you get from whole grains that you can’t get from meat, vegetables, or dairy anyway, so I don’t know why nutritionists are so enamored with them. They’re a form of easily stored and easily accessed energy, and that is really all they have going for them.

It makes me think about land-use issues and how we’ve deforested so much of the world now in order to grow grain. What if we’d chosen to keep hunting instead? What if instead of grain fields it was all forest to this day, which sheltered the animals we needed to eat? Did you know that after the Neolithic period and the agricultural revolution began, people began suffering more from chronic diseases and did not grow as tall? It’s true. Nature has Her own wisdom.

Enough preaching, I guess, for now. I think I will restart the diet today (it’s a little bit after midnight). It’s almost the middle of the week, and so I figure I can do Induction for a week and a half and I should be OK. I’m kind of annoyed at myself because if I hadn’t started faltering I could be at 45 or 50g a week by now. Oh, well.

Brief hiatus

Things have gotten a bit too out of hand dietwise. I haven’t gone on any binges or anything; I’ve just gone too high on my carb intake. Think in terms of “closer to USDA allowance than Atkins allowance,” ha ha. (USDA allowance is 300g a day for a 2000-calorie diet. That’s 1200 calories, by the way, if you count those.)

Since we were out running around anyway I asked Matt if we could stop at Papa John’s. I explained about the recent cheats and deciding that since I was out of ketosis yesterday (and I was), I might as well give it a couple of days in which I eat what I want before I get back on the wagon. Couple of days are not going to kill me. So pizza it was. I impressed myself, however; I ate maybe half a large pizza rather than almost an entire one like I used to do, and I am still drinking diet soda. I didn’t want to wreck myself THAT far.

I have to say Papa John’s is weird anymore. I hadn’t had it in months because Gumby’s is cheaper so we were getting pizza there, and when we got PJs last night it smelled slightly weird. Couldn’t put my finger on it; probably was the spice blend in the sauce. Pizza Hut, however, would not have been an improvement. PH is the Dairy Queen of pizza crust: all air bubbles.

OK, enough of that…

Not wanting to undo the gains I have made, though. Well, OK, this was the diametric opposite of a gain in the weight sense, har-har, but it was a gain healthwise, I think. So I need to restart soon.

I would be lying, though, if I said I wasn’t somewhat anxious about the prospect. I know I don’t need to go back to eating lots and lots of grain food and I sure had better never go back to regular soda. And I know a good bit of my problem is not getting enough veggies. But sometimes I think I should just go for a more whole-foods diet that includes carb foods and see how I do on it, because when it is possible to cheat on a diet by eating brown rice, that feels a little weird. (Oddly, too, brown rice didn’t knock me out of ketosis. Now, I didn’t eat as much as I usually do but I didn’t stick with the standard-sized single serving, either. I have heard that rice does not mess with insulin levels as much as grain foods usually do, which may explain this to some degree–it would have been easier to process it through my system and then recover.) On the other hand, eating a lot of brown rice would feel kind of pointless, as grain loses its nutrition as it ages in one’s pantry and it’s only got fiber and B vitamins going for it in the first place.

More later. I am being paged.

Family around the tree, Dec 1993

Family around the tree, Dec 1993

Originally uploaded by Dana Seilhan

That’s me on the left. If you go to Flickr the caption I wrote explains the picture further. I was nineteen going on twenty at the time, and about 130-135lbs or so.

I was never what you’d call in tip-top shape even with being in the military; I was lazy when it came to exercise and did the bare minimum I could get away with. Paid the price, too. People, when you hear advice to eat right and get enough exercise, do yourself a favor and heed it, no matter how much of a pain it is. Find something fun, I don’t care what it is, and just DO it. My life story ought to be illustrative in that regard, don’t you think?

Body image

I took some more photographs of myself today, frontal and side. I might still upload them but they didn’t turn out very well. I mean that in a technical sense. Things are not stacked up in my home office in the same way they were at the beginning of July, and I’m having a hard time placing my camera such that I get good mostly-full-body shots.

I do have a full-sized tripod and I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t just drag it out and use it. I can be short on common sense oftener than I’d like.

Not that I’m thrilled at seeing myself in a photograph anyway. It helps knowing that people see me every day and with the exception of one person several months ago, nobody’s called me names since I put on all this weight. I guess I must be passable, then. But knowing what I looked like at eighteen and how much I’ve decayed does little for my self-image.

What really got my attention this time around was the uneven boob size. Since I finished puberty they’ve been different sizes anyway, but it wasn’t glaringly obvious. Now, thanks to size changes and stretch-mark-induced sag, it is. The being larger and deflated I could probably deal with; the pointing mostly to the floor I might have been all right with; the looking head on at a torso shot of myself and seeing one boob seemingly half the size of the other (or close to it), well, I don’t cope so well with that.

It’s kind of sad because I didn’t have much to speak of as far as boob size when I was eighteen. Now that I’ve got boobs they’re not behaving. Oh, the irony.

Even when (I refuse to say “if”) the extra weight’s gone, my problems aren’t over. And it isn’t just that I’ll have to wear a bra to get things under control, something with which I am not bothering right now because I’d just have to buy another one in a few months. It’s that I don’t know what my midriff will look like but I’m pretty sure it’ll be a wreck. It’s that my jawline’s probably gone for good too, and it was never great to begin with. It’s that when you make your skin hold in more than it was genetically encoded to hold in, bad things happen to your appearance.

I’m trying to be optimistic. My face will surely look better when I don’t have ten extra pounds on it. It is a wreck at present. I look like I’ve gone without sleep for five years. I’ve got sun damage; particularly, a brown spot under each eye, neither of which existed five years ago. I’ve got what appear to be permanent creases under my eyes as well, as though I spent that five years tossing and turning and digging my face into my pillow. I’m a fright.

Again, I wasn’t model material at eighteen, but I didn’t look like this. And only some of it is normal aging.

So, sometimes I kind of wonder why I’m bothering if I’m going to look like hell at the end of this as well as I do now. I guess I will at least be able to say I can fit into normal sizes, which will mean normal clothes prices and being able to find clothes at thrift stores without too much trouble and so on and so forth.

I gotta say, though: I consider myself a feminist, but a boob job and several trips to the dermatologist sound REALLY good to me about now. And the idea of elective surgery terrifies me with all these drug-resistant bugs going around in hospitals now, but if I had the money and could guarantee I wouldn’t catch any of those bugs, you better bet I’d go ahead. I feel like I wasted the years in which I looked good through stupidity and short-sightedness and it’d be nice to have a do-over there, too. Barring that, I’d at least settle for looking less Night Of The Living Dead.

This extended moment of whining, self-centered vanity brought to you by WordPress. Hey, at least it was free.

There’s always the do-over.

Boy, I’ve really been getting on my own nerves lately. I am supposed to be gradually easing back into carb-eating by adding WHOLE foods. What have I been doing instead? Taking up my carb count with junk and with non-junk that I’m not supposed to be eating right now. It’s rather difficult to see whether I’m OK at 35 grams or at 40 grams (the next step up the carb ladder) when I’m eating enough carbs to almost take me out of ketosis.

If you’re wondering whether I’m annoyed at myself, you would be correct.

And it’s not the all-too-common excuse of, “You must need those foods or else you wouldn’t eat them.” Nobody needs a candy bar or a bowl of ice cream. Nobody needs French fries. Y’know, that kind of thing. In my case it’s been too many low-carb tortillas (I have devised an excellent method of eating cheese sandwiches when feeling snacky), brown rice, and the occasional taste of something I’m not supposed to have. And too much coffee. If I’m going to do the coffee perhaps I should grab some Da Vinci sugar-free syrups, as they have no carb count while granular Splenda is one gram per teaspoon. And that’s without counting the heavy cream. Le sigh.

And yes, I’m still having issues with vegetables. That’s got to change.

I think I need to start over with Induction. I don’t think I will need it longer than a week (if I start it tomorrow I’ll be on it a little over a week, actually). But just to get the junk out of my system, make myself eat the veggies and so forth.

The weight loss is going fine and better than fine. That’s not the issue. The issue is I need to be better at this healthy eating thing than I am presently.

I think something else I need to do is make menus for myself. If I know what I’m supposed to eat in a given day then it won’t be so easy to go over my carb count and I won’t have to worry about being under it either.

Wish me luck.

Time zone error

Hey, just a tip for those who, like me, are new to WordPress: When you are setting your time zone under Options in your Dashboard, pay no attention whatsoever to the little note on how to set the offset. You know, where it says “Example: -6 for Central Time.” If you live in the Eastern U.S. time zone and pay attention to that little blurb you will be an hour behind. Just change the offset until the display time shows your proper time. I had to set it on -4 in order to have my datestamp show the correct time.

It’s a minor issue but a potentially annoying one. I wish they’d just let us pick a time zone and be done with it.

Do what?

I was Googling for info about pomegranates and carb count. I wasn’t completely satisfied with what CalorieKing had to say about it because they didn’t take the seeds into account, and when I’ve eaten pomegranate, I eat the seeds. I would think that would factor into the fiber count and all.

While looking around I ran across a conversation on the message board of a low-carbing bodybuilder website. Lo and behold, an administrator on that board was preaching about how ketogenic diets are unnecessary except for people with any of a few specific health problems, one of them being epilepsy.

Wait a minute. He’s on a low-carb site… and he opposes ketogenic diets.

Let that sink in.

You know, I’ve been on this diet for almost two months and aside from some cramping–and I make sure to supplement with calcium, magnesium, and potassium now, which works pretty well–I’ve been fine. Better than fine. I’ve dropped about twenty pounds and gone from a 24 to an 18 in that time period. Yeah, ketogenic diets suck all right. You betcha, I sure didn’t need to be on one.

Where do they dig up these people, anyway? A serious paranoid would almost call them agents provocateurs.