The right diet?

I've often wondered if my choice of "diet" is the right one. Simply based on the way I feel and the way I lose when I'm doing well, I think I've made the right choice. For me, low carb is the way to go - despite the fact I've struggled, I'm still a hundred pounds lighter than when I've started the journey.

There are all sorts of "easy diets" out there - all cabbage diets, all carrot diets, all meat diets, all Jesus diets etc.

Jesus diets? Well, at least diets based on the bible. Check this out...I think this stuff is perfect for a low carber when they have lost the weight and are ready to maintain. Although, since this guy jokes they have a version made with people poop I have my concerns. Maybe another brand of sprouted grain is in order... whatever - he misses the point, and I'll ignore his satire. Who gives a crap that "Food for Life" may be using the biblical reference to sell to Christians? Fact remains, the Ezekiel bread is packed with fiber and live grains and that's GOOD for ya! And no, Ezekiel 4:12 bread doesn't exist - buy the Ezekiel 4:9 bread.

Week 3 Progress Report: Slow but Steady

Starting weight: 300.6

Current weight: 286.8

Total shrinkage: 13.8 lbs


Week three has arrived, and I overshot my weekly goal by just a tad - 2.6 instead of 2.4. I'm not going to cry over that. As I hoped, the weight loss slowed to a more reasonable pace. Perhaps I should start tracking caloric and carb intake, it would be interesting to see what happens if I change things up for a week or so. I didn't try to reinvent the wheel yet, I just added a few more carbs in the form of a larger salad each day. Also, I added it one particular day in the form of pizza.

Yeah, it's true - I ate a piece of pizza. Interesting thing happened - I still kept losing weight, but my hydration levels/BMI changed dramatically for 48 hours according to my "broken" scale. I'm thinking that it's not as much broken as its just pissing me off. Check out my post about the stupid scale.

When I'm dehydrated, my scale gives me a depressing BMI. Basically, it's all over the place. Every two months I'll be creating a chart like the one above tracking BMI and hydration as its reported by my scale. Stupid or not, I think I may just have to take the numbers as they are given then sort it all out in the end.

Good news! I'm moving, most likely, to a place with a pool. I need to strengthen my core, and swimming is a great low impact way to do that. A few months ago I ruptured a disk, and since then exercise has been boring and only effective for healing my back. Sure that's vital, but I want to be able to lift again. Weight loss is so easy with lifting! Plus, I really enjoy the workout.

An added bonus to swimming in my condition is that the pressure on my damaged back is greatly reduced when in the water. A bonus on top of that is the heat in the pool will improve circulation and help reduce swelling in the long run, which causes the nerve pain I experience in my leg from two other disks that are bulging out. If I treat my back before a swim with some good stretching and an ice down, that heat afterwards will feel great. My therapist will also be thrilled.

Thanks for tuning in this week for my third progress report! Time to get back to life - I'm going out to breakfast today, I found a great place downtown. I'll write about it on my return.

Nicotine cravings associated with hunger cravings?

In a previous post, Food addicts shouldn't take a day off from healing, I discussed how the suppression of my hunger pains also seemed to reduce my desire for compulsive activities in general. Well, after seeing from the LA Times "Study links brain region to smoking addiction" I looked up the "Insular Cortex" in Wiki.

Here is a bit from the article:

"The insula has increasingly become the focus of attention for its role in body representation and subjective emotional experience. In particular, Antonio Damasio has proposed that this region plays a role in mapping visceral states that are associated with emotional experience, giving rise to conscious feelings. This is in essence a neurobiological formulation of the ideas of William James, who first proposed that subjective emotional experience (i.e. feelings) arise from our brain's interpretation of bodily states that are elicited by emotional events. This is an example of embodied cognition. Functionally speaking, the insula is believed to process convergent information to produce an emotionally relevant context for sensory experience. More specifically, the anterior insula is related more to olfactory, gustatory, vicero-autonomic, and limbic function, while the posterior insula is related more to auditory-somesthetic-skeletomotor function. Functional imaging experiments have revealed that the insula has an important role in pain experience and the experience of a number of basic emotions, including anger, fear, disgust, happiness and sadness. Functional imaging studies have also implicated the insula in conscious desires, such as food craving and drug craving. What is common to all of these emotional states is that they each change the body in some way and are associated with highly salient subjective qualities. The insula is well situated for the integration of information relating to bodily states into higher-order cognitive and emotional processes. The insula receives information from "homeostatic afferent" sensory pathways via the thalamus and sends output to a number of other limbic-related structures, such as the amygdala, the ventral striatum and the orbitofrontal cortex."

Surprise! The insula regulates subjective emotions, hunger, and various other body states. Due to the fact that I'm so profoundly affected by proper diet, reason leads me to believe that the low carb lifestyle I've chosen was truly meant for my metabolism. I wasn't imagining things!

Notice I'm not saying, "Low Carb Cures Addiction" even though it's the case with me. I've heard plenty of people tell me about how they have done the same thing through simply exercising. What I will stick to is that what we do to our bodies our bodies do to us; if we excercise and eat well we will be rewarded.

I'll be investigating this further, so stay tuned - I'll scrape up some research concerning specific diets and their effect on mental states.

Week Two Progress Report - Charting and Predicting Progress

After two weeks of charting my weight, I have enough data to give some idea of how fast I may be approaching my goal.

In the chart to the left, the light blue bars represent actual loss. The dark line represents a trend, calculated using the equation you see at the top right. I chose this equation based simply on gut feeling rather than any special knowledge I have of this sort of thing. The resulting line simply looked like it may represent the diminishing returns of losing weight over a period of time. It's hard to tell by looking at this particular graph why the trend looked appropriate. Here is what helped me make the decision:



Notice in this 6 month forecast there is a bit of a curve to the trendline. It does seem steep - six months is too short of a time period to lose this much weight. I'm thinking this only because LAST time I lost that fast, I packed half of it back on!






So, I'd like to get to goal as close as possible to my 52nd progress report. It divides up to just about 2.4 lbs a week on average. I'm currently averaging 5.6 lbs a week. This average will fall, mostly because I lost water weight in the first few days. Notice the erratic numbers in the first graph?

So, 11.2 lbs lost in the first month. My chart tells me I'll lose another 11 lbs or so. Think I'll prove it right or wrong? Only time will tell. If the equation is good, then with more data I get closer to making a decent prediction!

Stay tuned...

Food addicts shouldn't take a day off from healing themselves

It’s become pretty clear to me that the “six day on one day off” approach to dieting doesn’t work, at least for me. I’ve heard people that have successfully used this approach to dieting, but for a person like me who is so soundly addicted to sugar and simple carbs it just doesn’t make sense. Have you ever heard of a drug addict using this type of approach? You don’t hear any doctors suggesting that a patient in a drug rehab program should “indulge” now and then.

If I have even one meal consisting of any carbs other than vegetables, my cravings for massive amounts of food kicks in and my willpower deteriorates. When I’m not “under the influence” of sugar or the like, I can quite easily pass up pretty much any kind of food if I shouldn’t eat it.

Also, when exercising, I find it much easier to resist binging. I also have some trouble with smoking – I currently smoke and I have plans to quit very soon. I know based on past experience that after a few weeks of eating low-carb I can also stop smoking with minimal cravings! It’s amazing, the connection between my sugar addiction and my various other vices. I feel so much more in control of my behavior when I don’t eat a ton of carbs. I feel less anxiety, I feel better about myself, and I sleep so much better!

When I was a kid, I was diagnosed with ADD – doctors also warned I could continue to experience symptoms into adulthood. I did, and I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Up until I started low-carbing, I had so little control over the way I lived my life. I had tremendous mood swings, insomnia, and simply wasn’t able to manage my life. Now that I’m older and have started taking better care of myself, the mental and emotional difficulties I experienced have slowly disappeared. I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m convinced – low-carb eating has alleviated the symptoms of serious mental illness. It did more than drugs or therapy ever did.

I am pretty sure that as time goes by, people will come to the realization that most of our health struggles (physical and mental) can be erased with proper diet and exercise. I think low-carb methods may not be perfect, but they have brought to light that we truly are still just barely scratching the surface as to how our bodies work as a whole.

Getting a head start with fat loss

I had originally planned, as I mentioned in a previous post, to ween myself off of a carb heavy diet and slowly ease into induction. As I started to eat better each day I got a little restless - my body was getting what it truly needed and begged for more. So, I've decided to give myself a head start and begin today instead of Sunday. I'm a bit strange - I wanted to start my two week induction at the beginning of the workweek. And, to give me another advantage I'll hit the weights! Here is why, and it might be a little different that what you're thinking...

For any weight loss plan, exercise is a must have if you want to keep off the weight and keep toned as you shrink into your new self. I find, especially with Atkins, weight training in the first 48 hours really buys you a major advantage. You see, low-carb diets work so well because they force your body to work extra hard to create the energy it needs because it loses much of its much-too-easy energy source - sugar. Fuel that is stored in your muscles, called glycogen, becomes harder to come by in a carb restricted metabolism so much of your fat is burned to fill the energy gap.

So, if you weight lift in the beginning stages of the diet you empty your muscles of the glycogen stores and therefore rev-up your metabolism faster than if you did cardio - and much faster if you didn't exercise at all. You see, ballistic exercises (like weight-lifting) require you to use the stored "quick-energy" in your muscles more than straight up cardio. Your body is forced to store energy in your muscles even faster than low-carbing alone.

The other advantage to not consuming simple carbs during weight loss has to do with the spike of insulin that comes when you eat, say, a candy bar. In a person who is insulin sensitive (ever get tired after eating alot of McDonald's or Ben and Jerry's?) the glucose made so easily from white bread and, well, sugar, is very quickly consumed and converted to fat. Not only does blood sugar then plummet because an insulin sensitive body consumes too much blood sugar - guess where all the glucose went as you feel you're ready to fall asleep? It converted to fat. Merry Christmas! You're now fat and tired, like I've been for a large portion of my life. These rapid spikes and dips are referred to as hypoglycemia.

When you are maintaining your weight, cardio will keep your cardiovascular system healthy but you will have yourself some extra fat insurance if you keep your muscles doing ballistic work - like weights! If you keep those muscles slightly hungry for good-old glycogen, you'll keep that fat from building up from extra glucose in your bod.

Lastly - I'm not a medical doctor. I can't predict how ANYONE will react to low carbing except me. I've heard many other folks who experienced the same sucess, and maybe you could too!

Read the book.. chat with your Doctor.. chat with two Doctors, and may you live a loooong life.

A little entertainment as you ponder todays post...