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.

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.

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.

“But I thought Atkins didn’t allow veggies!”

It seems supremely ironic to me that so many folks out there suffer from the misconception that Atkins doesn’t allow carbohydrate foods. I’ve even seen “experts” who should be smart enough to crack open a book and read for themselves, claiming that Atkins is unhealthy because it doesn’t allow plant foods.

The irony is that there is no way you can do Atkins correctly UNLESS you eat vegetables. Full stop. They are the backbone of your carbohydrate intake, unlike in the Standard American Diet (or even the USDA’s Food Pyramid) where grains are.

And you can’t appreciate this unless you are actually involved in the diet. You can’t appreciate how important vegetables are until you’ve used up your entire carb allowance for the day on “low-carb” processed foods, like I sometimes do. Then you realize you could have had a more nutritious diet that day but you’ve blown your chance.

I mean, you could go on and get your vegetable allowance, and if that’s what makes you feel better then go for it. But you will go way over your allowance, possibly knock yourself out of ketosis, and set yourself back days or weeks.

Dana Carpender applauds sugar alcohols for being a sweetener that enforces moderation (if you eat too many of them, they cause gastrointestinal distress; if you take Beano with them then they become digestible). Similarly, I applaud the Atkins plan itself for forcing its adherents to eat more healthy foods if we want any carb intake at all that we don’t have to feel guilty about later.

Carb counts and cheat foods

The weight-loss phases of Atkins are an excellent argument in favor of preparing most of one’s food at home. This is the most frugal and nutritious approach anyway if those are goals of yours; you know what’s going into your meals and you have total control. But it’s also a huge help with carb counts. Even when someone else makes my meal for me when I’m at home (my little girl’s dad sometimes cooks for us), I have to guesstimate a lot, but if I do it myself it’s no problem.

It sounds obsessive and control-freaky but one of the goals of Atkins is to know your limitations insofar as how many grams of carbohydrate you can get away with in a day and stay at your current weight or lose weight. And the reason this matters is that the primary metabolism for human beings is the glucose metabolism, and glucose calories are therefore the calories that count for most people. Fat is turned into various biochemicals and used to transport fat-soluble vitamins; protein is used to build cell structures; if you’re getting enough carbs, neither fats nor proteins are used for fuel. This is the gaping, bleeding hole in calorie theory. Calories do count, but only the ones you’re burning!

Meanwhile, I’ve been rotten this week, but only to a point. Wednesday I decided I was tired of salads and had a wrap sandwich at Subway. They don’t use the low-carb tortillas for their wraps anymore but I could have done worse; the wrap was 33g (I don’t know about the fiber content), lower than any of the breads. I checked the next day and I was still in ketosis. I’m not sure if I’d been knocked out of it at any point and then went back in; if not, my carb tolerance is higher than I thought it was! Yesterday at the state fair I ate a few French fries (as in, less than half a dozen) and bought a sugar-free “homebrewed” root beer at one of the booths; the man said he’d gotten complaints about the sugar-free version and his fix was to add less than half a cup of the sugary stuff on top to help the flavor. I agreed to it because he sweetens the diet root beer with aspartame, which I really do not like. I think I had one or two other episodes with stuff I was not supposed to eat–oh yeah. I got some sugar-free Twizzlers Thursday night. That in itself wasn’t much of a problem although it’s kind of stupid to use up your carb allowance with something that can only be described as junk food, but at the time I was missing junk, probably because I was hungry. So I ate more of those at a time than I should have. Again, it wasn’t an excessive cheat; I seem to be good at taking dabs here and bits there every now and again and then stopping. I still have some Twizzlers left, actually, I think, and it was a small package to begin with.

The cheating bugs me a little because even though I am reasonable-ish about it I don’t want to turn this into a nasty little pattern of justifying cheats to myself and then shriving myself afterwards. This may just be my conscience working in overdrive, though. I’m more worried, actually, that I’m not getting my full carb count during the day with stuff I AM supposed to eat than I am about the cheats.

I’ve upped my allowance to 35 grams a day for the next few weeks and will be doing my utmost to make sure I hit the mark more often than not. I really need to see if the weight loss continues at that level. It makes me wonder about how realistic it is to increase carb count 5g a week like the Atkins book says to do. Seems like in no time I would be up to 50g a week and wondering when the heck my weight loss stopped and having to back down again. Better to take it slowly, I would think.

Which also makes me wonder about the folks who choose to stay in Induction for months at a time. Dr. Atkins thought this would not be harmful to most people who try it, but why not simply add on about five grams a month? Then it’s lots easier to see where your carb tolerance is and you can still lose weight like whoa. And you can also still do the Pre-Maintenance phase of adding 10g at a time, at least in theory, later on.

Although I’m starting to wonder about that too. You’re supposed to do OWL until you’re within ten pounds or so of your goal weight. OK, fine. But what if your carb tolerance is low? It would be all too easy to overshoot your limit in Pre-Maintenance, I would think, especially if your ACE (Atkins Carbohydrate Equilibrium) is 40g or so.

Oh well. The beauty of this diet is that you can tailor it to some degree to meet your needs. Some people who go on Atkins never do Induction at all, but start at 100g a day or so and gradually lower the carb intake until they start losing (if they aren’t losing at 100–some people do!). Whatever works for you.

The hard part isn’t lowering the carb intake…

…but increasing it again. You wouldn’t think that would be the case, given all the horror stories about carb cravings and falling off the wagon. Incidentally, every now and again I get a very slight taste of something that’s supposed to be forbidden at this phase of the diet. But that’s it. Literally, just a taste, and then I’m fine again. Otherwise I have to force myself to remember to eat enough carbs to be at a proper level for this particular week. In OWL you have to add 5g a week of net carbs until you get to a point where you’re not losing anymore.

This is hard. Why? Don’t know. Part of it’s wrestling with eating vegetables. It’s one thing to shrug it off when you’re eating Standard American Diet and opt to take supplements instead. You can’t do that crap with Atkins. OK, you can take supplements and usually should, but if you skip the veggies you don’t get most of your carbs.

I finally got smart and opted for frozen veggies because salad wasn’t cutting it, no pun intended; I’d forget the stuff was in the fridge and it would rot, and that’s expensive. Frozen is mightily forgiving, though, in comparison. And yet, I’ve got like six bags of the stuff and I’m still not eating it. What gives?

No point wasting more time being analytical about it. Got to start eating the allotted amount tomorrow. In the meantime, I am not ramping up my carb intake anymore until I can hit 30g a day consistently for a week. Once I’ve got that down, we can struggle with 35g next time around.

One little deviation I don’t worry much about is carrots, by the way. They’re supposed to be high-glycemic but if you look at the carb count on a package of California mix (broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots), the net carb count is really low. I’ve also read that although they’re high on the glycemic index, you have to eat huge amounts of them to get that level of glycemic response. I haven’t been sent yammering after chocolate-chip cookies after partaking of them, so I won’t worry about it. They’re a great source of beta-carotene and fiber, they’re not acidic, and they’re not boring.

Something else to not sweat it about is yogurt. Dana Carpender quotes the authors of the GO-Diet as saying that since most of the lactose in yogurt has been converted to lactic acid, you only have to count 4g net carbs in a cup of yogurt. I’ve done that, and it works fine. I sweeten it with a teaspoon or two of Splenda (1-2g net), and I tried adding a packet of coffee-flavored sugarless Emergen-C to it the other day and it tasted pretty good. It also works with berries, obviously, which add another 3-5g per half-cup depending on which you’re working with. I wouldn’t mix berries with coffee flavor, though. And this is still just an occasional treat, not an everyday thing.

Silken tofu might be a better bet, for smoothies made with low-glycemic fruit.

But first let’s get the veggies back up. That’s vital. At least I am still taking my vitamins just about every day.

Well, here goes nothing.

I was going to take the domain mylowcarblife.wordpress.com, but much to my dismay someone had disregarded the WordPress team’s request that folks not take domain names they weren’t going to use… so the domain I wanted sits as an empty blog, completely unedited and abandoned. *weeps* I could not for the life of me think of another name that wouldn’t sound hokey or conflict with another LC blogger, so I dropped the “my” from the domain name; lo and behold, it was available.

LiveJournal is great for personal blogs, especially as their security filters are very easy to use. Unfortunately there is something of a high-school mentality among many of the users at that site, LJ is not taken terribly seriously in the rest of the blogosphere, and it can be difficult to drum up an audience if you want to do a specialty blog. I don’t need a multitude of usericons here; I’m only here to write about my experiences and share info with others. Also, my LJ audience doesn’t seem terribly interested in my weekly weight loss adventures other than the occasional “Atta girl!” when I’ve lost a few pounds. So, overall the specialty blog approach on a “real” blog site seems best. We’ll see how this goes.

I have attempted Atkins three times. The first time, in January 2004, I stayed on plan for at least four weeks. I did not have a scale at that time to measure weight changes but it seemed to me I was losing inches already. At that time I stayed pretty much in the 180-pound range at 5′6″, so I needed to lose weight but it wasn’t desperate.

The second time was two years ago when I realized my weight was ballooning. I had had my second child in November 2004 (I had quit Atkins before finding out I was pregnant–and I mean just), and while I originally got down to my prepregnancy weight with seemingly no effort whatsoever, the pounds started coming back on soon after. By the time my daughter was two months old I was just over two hundred pounds, as the scale testified at my postpartum visit. At roughly the same time it seemed like I was losing a lot of hair, which may have been hormonal changes, but my skin was also dry and scaly in weird places. I suspected thyroid issues, as did others close to me, but when I got tested I was told the results were normal. I was on Medicaid at the time and the doctor seemed dismissive, so who knows what was going on there; I know now that TSH is not the only possible indicator of thyroid problems, and that you can have a normal TSH and still be hypothyroid. I don’t have insurance at this point and I’m losing weight on Atkins now, so it’s pretty much moot until I can get coverage again or get taken seriously at a free clinic.

Anyway, so by that summer I finally got hold of a scale and was unpleasantly shocked to discover that not only was I over 200 but creeping ever closer to 250! I don’t remember now exactly what my weight was but it was a jarring discovery. Hence starting Atkins again. I was nursing my daughter and was aware that Dr. Atkins had recommended against nursing mothers attempting the diet, but I had done my homework and learned that mothers in famine conditions still produce nutritionally perfect milk, and I knew I would be eating better than a mother in famine conditions.

Unfortunately, the whole thing backfired. Induction was tremendously difficult, I was trying to take care of a young baby mostly by myself, I was stressing out over a little cat family I had taken in to keep them out of the shelters (they were tearing up everything, it seemed like), and to top it off my daughter was starting to complain when she nursed. I suspect I smelled funny to her once I achieved ketosis, and she was too young to know that it was OK, just Mommy smelling different. I couldn’t take the stress after a couple of days and gave up.

This time around my daughter is two and a half, I have better emotional and logistical support with my life in general, and I got a rude awakening when I went to a local festival and visited a diabetes advocacy organization’s booth. My first non-fasting glucose number was 54; the second was 39, which is the highest end of normal range. I’m not sure why the numbers varied so greatly within thirty seconds of one another, but even high normal is scary with my family history. Everybody female in my mother’s line plus aunts and possibly a sister or two of hers is diabetic, Mom’s father is diabetic, and my father was diagnosed with Type 2 at the end of 2005. Then came the high nonfasting number and I knew I’d better get my butt in gear or I was facing serious health problems in another three to five years. And that’s being generous.

It isn’t that I think being fat is going to cause my diabetes. This is something that I think even some medical personnel don’t quite understand: Obesity is a symptom of underlying health issues which lead to diabetes, not necessarily a cause. If being fat always caused diabetes then there shouldn’t be any skinny people out there with hyperinsulinemia, which is a symptom of insulin resistance and a precursor to type 2 diabetes–but there are. So while I don’t like being this overweight and wouldn’t mind looking better (to me, anyway), the truth is that the changes I need to make to stave off diabetes are going to be the same changes I’d need to lose the extra weight, just as your runny nose goes away when your body kills off a cold.

So, this time around I began at the beginning of July. My starting weight was 237.5. Yesterday I weighed in at 224.5, a loss of thirteen pounds. That’s a loss of 2.6 pounds per week. I lost more in Induction phase and I had a week or two where I appeared to stall, but 2.6 a week is nothing to sneeze at. If I kept up at that pace I would lose all the weight I needed to lose in just under a year, or by eleven months from now. I will probably not continue losing at that pace, because sooner or later in the Ongoing Weight Loss phase you slow down significantly from your original loss pace, but that’s all right. I feel better already and can do things like change the bedsheets without winding myself, and that’s just with a thirteen-pound loss so I certainly can’t complain!

“Before” photos, beginning measurements, and a summary of how I’ve done so far are forthcoming. I hope you will follow along with me on my journey and that we both learn something positive from it.