So far back on the low-carb wagon, it’s going well. For the first two weeks, I did a liver cleansing thing from the Eadeses’ latest book that consisted of a lot of protein shakes. That was more about detoxifying the liver than weight loss, so I didn’t lose any weight until last week when I went back to strict low-carb. It was a busy week, so it meant lots of quick stuff like eggs and burgers. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done: 2.4 pounds down, 42.6 to go!
I haven’t talked much about diet lately, because I was doing kind of a half-hearted job of it. I didn’t have any real high-carb days (except one Christmas party), because I finally got it through my head that I really don’t want to go into a seizure from falling blood sugar after the peak. But I was getting a few too many carbs here and there—eating a few of the fries I forgot to tell them to leave out when I ordered a burger, taking a vegetable dish at a potluck that turned out to have rice in it, and things like that. It was probably only a couple times a week, but if it takes 3-4 days for your metabolism to get fully into a solid fat-burning groove, twice a week is often enough to keep knocking it out of the groove before it gets started. Read more »
One thing low-carbers hear a lot is that we don’t eat enough vegetables. The USDA’s food pyramid recommends 3-5 servings of vegetables a day, but they also recommend 6-11 servings of grain, so they’re insane. And since they define a “serving” of vegetables as a half-cup of cooked veggies or a full cup of raw, most high-carb eaters I know don’t come close to that. (Remember, corn and potatoes are not vegetables; they’re in the grain category. Neither is ketchup.)
Week two of low-carbing went very well. I lost another two pounds, which would be mostly fat this time, since I shed the extra water the first week. On the low-carb newsgroup, I’d report it as 248/242/199. That’s my starting weight, my current weight, and my goal weight. That’s a bit of shorthand people there use to save typing.
Well, my first week back on the low-carb plan went great. I kept at or below 30 grams of carbs every day, and dropped four pounds, from 248 to 244. Forty-five to go! A good bit of that is the water that’s released when the body takes excess sugar out of storage, so it’s not like I’ll be losing four pounds every week. But that first “whoosh,” as it’s often called on low-carb forums, is a useful bit of feedback that tells you you’re doing it right.
As of yesterday, I’m back on my eating plan to lose weight, control my blood sugar, and stay healthy. The carb cravings are still pretty strong, so for now I’ve been eating a lot of eggs and simple meat like sausage patties, to keep my belly full so I don’t eat anything stupid. In another couple days, my sugar and insulin should be normalized, and I’ll add more variety.
Angel wrote a couple good posts on low-carb eating recently, which reminded me that I haven’t talked about my diet in a long time. There just hasn’t been much to report. We haven’t tried many new recipes lately, mostly just sticking to meals we’re used to, and I didn’t lose any weight over the winter.
I can’t blame that on the diet, though; it’s my own fault for not sticking to it strictly enough. It seems like I’m pretty strict, until I actually keep track and add it up. About once or twice a week, I’ve been eating too many carbs. Sometimes I go way overboard, like on Easter, when the candy and cheesecake were just too tempting. Other times it’s not drastic, like eating a pound of peanuts or a few too many crackers, but still too many carbs to stay firmly in ketosis (fat-burning mode).
I’m not really hungover; all I drank at the bar last night was water. But I’m tired, achy, and sort of foggy and slow, so most of the same symptoms are there except for the headache.
I’m going to be glad when this pool league session is over. I enjoy playing and being there, especially when I win like I did last night. But it makes Sunday too long a day, starting with 8am Mass and ending around 11pm after pool league, usually with a family visit or a party of some sort in between. For an introvert like me, even if all those things are enjoyable, they certainly don’t make for a day of rest. I feel like I need to start taking Mondays off to recover from Sunday. That doesn’t seem right.
Oh well, seven more weeks and this session will be over. I’ll take the summer off for sure, and then switch to a weeknight if I play in the fall. When I used to play on Tuesday nights, that was much better.
When it was raining yesterday, I wished we’d gotten some garden seeds planted. But it got so cold last night we might be glad we waited. If it’s too cold for germination to start and the seeds are completely soaked for a few days, they may rot. After this storm front moves through, we should be able to plant our early stuff just in time for the next sunny spell.
My FreeBSD-induced traffic surge seems to have dwindled now. It’s amazing how you can write 100+ articles about all sorts of different things, and you never know which one is going to happen to catch the attention of a much busier site and get you a link that quintuples your traffic overnight. I guess that’s why most blogging experts focus more on how to create or attract links from big sites than they do on writing the actual content. The content doesn’t have to be especially good or original, if the right person decides to share it.
Recently we tried a new recipe I found on Jimmy Moore’s low-carb site, low-carb baked macaroni and cheese using shirataki noodles. It was pretty good, but I made the mistake of replacing the bread crumbs with crushed pork rinds and the rinds turned out to be fairly stale, so that flavor kind of overwhelmed the mild flavor of the mac-and-cheese. Next time we’ll get some low-carb bread for the crumbs; with those it’s still supposed to have only 5 grams of carb per serving. Fresh pork rinds would probably work okay too, but it really doesn’t need to be lower in carbs than 5/serving. When we get it the way we like it, I’ll do a full article on it with pictures and talk some more about those noodles.
Amnesty International has officially declared that both sides in the Burundi war were committing “human rights violations.” The whole point of guerrilla war is to commit human-rights violations. There are no battles in this kind of war, just massacres and ambushes. Like I keep saying, that’s what war is, most of the time, for most of the people in the world — and who’s to say that Gettysburg and Verdun are “good wars” and tribal chopfests are “bad wars”? — The War Nerd
