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.

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?

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.

Still in ketosis, and observations about metabolism and starvation

I’m not sure if I ever went completely out of ketosis the other night with the rice crackers, but if I did, I didn’t stay out of it for very long. I use ketone testing strips (Ketostix brand) to check, and they’ve been at least a very light pink every time I’ve tested. Today they are more back to normal, probably around 80mg/dl or slightly less.

I suddenly have this insight on why you don’t give candy bars to starving prisoners you’ve just released from Auschwitz. They’ve been in ketosis all that time, and the candy bar is sugar city. Not good.

In fact, given that benign dietary ketosis has a good bit in common with fasting, I suddenly have this insight on feeding people whove been fasting or starving. I’ve been Googling and trying to figure out what the refeeding process is with someone who’s been undernourished and it’s not very clear to me, but it seems the medical establishment obsesses over the patient’s insulin levels getting too high too fast.

Seems to me they ought to be doing a reverse of Atkins. The patient needs a kidney function test to see how much protein they can tolerate, among other things. But the first calories they ought to get should be fat calories. You’ve got catabolism going on, which involves using fat and protein as fuel sources. Give a body enough dietary fat and it won’t need as much protein. You’d change the proportions from mostly fat to fat-and-protein, gradually increasing the protein as tolerated, and then bring in glycemic carbohydrates–again, gradually. I don’t imagine it would take much time but if you get the patient stabilized with a caloric intake that agrees with what their body is presently doing, shouldn’t that make re-introducing glucose safer?

I’m really surprised nobody seems to have thought of this yet, especially with the low-carb craze of the early aughts and all the scientific literature available demonstrating that BDK is safe. Obviously starvation is not benign ketosis but you could make that ketosis benign by the choices of what you feed the patient.

It’d be really funny if, in finding a diet that helped his cardiac patients, Dr. Atkins also found a way to help victims of starvation. He did not pioneer the earliest work on benign dietary ketosis, but he popularized it. Odd how life works out sometimes.

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.