This weekend, two different people asked me what the title of my blog means. That was surprising, considering I’ve been blogging so little lately that I didn’t figure anyone was checking it anymore. So here’s the explanation — the long, long version. Read more »
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.
I mentioned a beef roast I made a while back, so when I made another one last week, I thought I’d write it up as a recipe with pictures.
Arm Roast
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.
Methuselah has done a 5-minute video that does a great job of simply explaining the reasons for eating paleo/low-carb:
I’ve got a couple new low-carb articles floating around in my head, but no time to get them typed up right now, so they’ll have to wait.
Latest Latin Lesson is up, on the Second Conjugation.
photo from flickr.com
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).
