You can find these posts here, if you’re interested.

With the exception of the exercise and the calorie-counting, last week was really how I spent a good amount of time keeping weight off on all my years of low carb.

Problem is: I still want to take those extra pounds off.

So what to make of last week in that light? Well, if you look at the total calories I took in, it was below the 2,500 that somebody thinks the average adult male needs to maintain weight. I averaged 2,250. The calorie believers would say “If you kept at the 1,600 calories you are supposed to be doing, stupid, you’d lose the weight.”

Maybe.

But then I wonder about those days of eating more calories – and Lindt chocolates – and losing weight.

This makes me wonder if I shouldn’t try – just for a week – to UP the calories by eating more fat. See where it brings me.

To be honest, I’m not sure I can do this for a week. Maybe I’ll give it a try. I’m still on the fence with this one, however – I picture myself eating sticks of butter. For now, let’s pretend I am going to do it, and see where it leads me.

So the first thing I should nail down is how much protein I need. I had a vague number in my head, but I used a calculator at this site and it gave me 108 grams. I think this is pretty important because protein is used by your body to produce the necessary glucose. I also checked the The New Atkins for a New You and got a range: 86-178 grams. I’m going to try to shoot for the lower end of that range.

• I’m still going to count calories – but I don’t care how many there are.
• I’ll try to cut back on the Atkins shakes a bit – no more than 1 a day
• My blood work came back showing I’m ever so slightly deficient in vitamin D, so I’m going to add that to my daily multivitamin and magnesium.
• I’ll still exercise and drink too much coffee, of course.
• I’m going to try to cut back on the Altoids Smalls – perhaps they are part of the stall?
• If I’m hungry – I’ll eat.

Sunday, March 18, 2012 – 206.6

Got up before 6am and reset the LoseIt! app on my iPhone so that, by its reckoning, I would ‘maintain’ my weight. The caloric allotment gives me 2,609 calories a day. Again – I’m counting just as a data point in my experiment this week – it’s not a goal. for breakfast I made 3 fried eggs with butter. Exercised early, and while out, got a jar of 1000mg vitamin D and heavy cream. As I infused myself with weak coffee through the day, I spiked it with cream and butter, melting 2 tablespoons of butter in the microwave for 1 minute. No, it isn’t gross, and I believe that some culture (Turks?) does this regularly – it’s certainly not as gross as putting canned haggis in your coffee, that’s for sure.

I next ate mid afternoon – roast beef and butter – maybe 2 ounces of roast beef to 2 tablespoons of butter. A bit later the family went to Joe’s Crab Shack – there was a birthday in the family and my wife got some steamer pots and an appetizer tray of fried crap for the table to share. Joe’s isn’t a bad place – I’m able to have steamer pots with lobster, crawfish, shrimp mussels, clams – and butter to dip it in. The dishes also come with corn, potatoes and sausage – the corn and potatoes I leave for the others, of course.

Back from the festivities, there was cake. I went upstairs to avoid it, but by daughter helpfully brought me a slice. I brought it back to the kitchen and instead ate 2 ‘red hots’ – sausages that stump my LoseIt! app. I searched on the Internet and did find a nutrition listing – and their grade of ‘D-’ for the food. I also dipped these in a parmesan salad dressing my wife bought. Yum.

I know you won’t believe it – I was full by this time. My butter tally for the day was an entire stick. Woah. I also cut back on the Altoid Smalls – I’m counting them now – and only had about 5.

Total calories for the day (rough estimate): 2422. Fat: 214g, Net carbs: 7g, Protein: 114g (80/1/19%)

Monday, March 19, 2012 – 204.4

I actually found it hard to eat the total amount of calories I was supposed to consume yesterday. I kept my carbs below 20g and had ample protein.

Woke up at 4:30 and had coffee with the 2 tablespoons of butter and a tablespoon of heavy cream.

At work I had my shake maybe 10am, then some more coffee with butter. The afternoon was about 4 ounces of roast beef and butter – a LOT of butter (I like – no - love butter, so don’t think I’m not enjoying this). I also had maybe 3/4 cup of the mexican spinach I made over the weekend.

By now I was feeling weird. It’s tough to put a finger on it. I was clear mentally, but a little shaky – like the coffee was having an extra-strong effect on me. My head felt weird. I felt weird driving home, and I went to exercise and almost decided to give up after the first set. I finished it, though. I had an idea I knew what was going on. When I went home I tested for it – yep. Ketosis – deep ketosis.

Eating as much fat as I have for only 2 days appears to have brought on powerful ketosis quick. This was much quicker than I ever remember getting into ketosis – it’s usually 3-5 days for me.

But then again, I never tried eating entire sticks of butter.

I wasn’t hungry, nor tired, really. Maybe a word needs to be coined for the feeling: ketosy. Yeah – was feeling that feeling when you make the crossover from carb-burning to ketone-burning – ketosy.

Later in the evening I had 2 hot dogs with more of that salad dressing from the day before, and some American cheese as my dinner, then went to bed.

I kept the Altoid Smalls to 3 or 4 - way down from my normal usage. If they were the culprit in anything, they shouldn’t be now.

Total calories for the day: 2642.  Fat: 224g, Net carbs: 24g, Protein: 118g (77/5/18%)

Tuesday, March 20, 2012 – 203.4

I still felt weird. acclimating to running on ketones takes a little time – every time. Today I introduced turkey breast and mayonnaise to mix things up, having about 5 tablespoons of may0 with 5 ounces turkey breast. There was coffee and butter in the am, roast beef and butter in the afternoon, an Atkins shake on the way home, and maybe too much of the mexican spinach – maybe 2 cups, covered in cheese, and 2 tablespoons of cream before bed.

There was more hunger today, the cause could have been the introduction of the turkey breast, the mayo, or some other random factor. I exercised and while still tough, it was easier than yesterday. Walked at lunch to soak up some sun. My mood seemed to be fine.

Total calories for the day: 2632.  Fat: 201.7g, Net carbs: 38g, Protein: 166g (69/6/25%)

Wednesday, March 21, 2012 – 203.2

Isn’t it weird how I’ve upped the calories and fat yet the weight loss seems to follow the arc from previous weeks? It’s the ‘Groundhog day’ effect, it seems. It doesn’t matter how many calories – it matters what type.

Speaking of calories, I began to wonder where this magical 2,500 calories per day comes from. Or the 2,000 calories a day – I’ve seen both. Once again, it seems I shouldn’t question these ‘facts’.

Considering the experts that make pronouncements about the number of calories someone should eat must either make assumptions as to what type of calories they are – or ignore it entirely, I’m already biased against it. I DID find a BMR – a ‘basal metabolic rate’ calculator that reduces us to mere machines in its stupid simplicity: take your height and weight and age,  and like magic, this simple formula tells you how many calories to eat.

I think it’s hogwash. I did my own calculation anyway and my BMR is 1,886.49. From this, you are supposed to be able to figure out how many calories you need to maintain your weight, based upon how much exercise you get. As I AM actually exercising, I chose the ‘If you are lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week)‘ and using the Harris Benedict formula, I am supposed to multiply my BMR by 1.375, which give me 2,593.25 calories per day to maintain – close to 2,609 given by the LoseIt! app – I guess they use the BMR as well.

The day’s eating was more or less what I’ve had on previous days. Mood was a bit low this morning, but this time of year my mood is tied to the weather, and it was cloudy and dismal. During the day the sun had come out and my mood improved with it.

Exercise was similar to yesterday as well – on day 3 of ketosis, it’s still a bit of a struggle – but the same struggle as yesterday.

I bought the diabetes test strips, which I haven’t in a while. I’m going to introduce those to look for some patterns in my blood glucose. I measured it for the first time when I got home: 96.

I had a 700-calorie deficit in the evening so had kilbasa sausage with salad dressing, and cheese. I’ve noticed that now that I am getting ample calories – the amount that the BMR states I should be getting to maintain weight – cravings for carbs seem to be curbed.

But will I lose weight doing this? I suppose the goal of this ‘experiment of one’ is to see if I can lose weight eating a ‘weight-maintaining’ amount of calories.

Total calories for the day: 2676.  Fat: 229g, Net carbs: 19g, Protein: 139g (76/4/20%)

Thursday, March 22, 2012 – 202.2 – Blood glucose 125

I had 19 grams of net carbs yesterday and my fasting blood glucose is 125. What gives? A reader, John, sent me an email on this subject a week or so ago on a 2008 post that was perfectly timed as I’ve just got my tests back from the endocrinologist:

I saw your blog entry (nearly four years old!) where you were digging into insulin resistance. Well… I’ve just found at least one reference that suggests that some level of insulin resistance (in the muscles – so they don’t suck up all the sugar for glycogen and starve the nervous system), and higher fasting blood sugars, are *expected* in low carb diets. A fasting blood sugar of 102 – a danger of incipient diabetes for most folks – can be normal for a low-carber.

If you’re still worried about possible diabetes  here’s a suggestion: get a glucose meter. Eat a normal meal. Check your blood sugar for the next two hours – hourly, or, if you’re a numbers geek, half-hourly (or even every fifteen minutes – but test strips are expensive). (BTW: even if you’re eating food with 0 carbs, your blood sugar *will* go up, for almost all people, almost always. But, this test is best done with a normal amount of carbs – the most you’d normally eat without “cheating”  so you get an accurate picture of how your body handles your “worst” meal.)

If it never goes above 140 – don’t worry. Seriously. Stop. Right now. You don’t have any problems, and it’s probably low-carbing that’s causing your fasting sugar to be a bit higher. If you do go over 140, and don’t come back down pretty quickly (within 2 hours), you *do* want to talk to your doctor. Keep the glucose meter, run the test a few times just to be sure. Other than that, make sure your doctor always runs an A1C (sometimes called HbA1C) test as well – this tells you a kind of running average of your blood sugar. If this is low, a 102 isn’t nearly as much of a concern.

I asked for the sources and got this:

Here’s two links – I’m afraid they’re not primary source:
http://chriskresser.com/when-your-%E2%80%9Cnormal%E2%80%9D-blood-sugar-isn%E2%80%99t-normal-part-2

http://paleohacks.com/questions/81687/fasting-blood-sugars#axzz1oWC0aKsk
(this one points to other links)

One other thing that’s worth noting: there’s a well-known phenomena called the “dawn effect” where a person’s rising blood sugar level might be higher than their fasting level. Technically, your fasting level is where you are after 8 hours. Pragmatically, it’s *hard* to expect people not to eat for 8 hours prior to a blood draw, so it’s easiest to take it in the morning, and call that your fasting level. But some people’s bodies think they need some extra fuel in the morning.

If the word ‘diabetes’ is significant to you, I recommend you reading the 2 links. ‘Dawn effect’ and the notion that there needs to be a certain amount of insulin resistance on a very low carb diet are both new to me and I want to explore them more.

Thanks, John, for writing. You folks who take the time to comment and send me emails do help me a lot. I most decidedly don’t have it all figured out, and some of your insights and comments send me in new directions.

So my blood glucose was 125 when I first got up. I took it 40 minutes later and it was 111. 90 minutes later it was 134. Interesting…in a nerd sort of way. I decided to track my glucose during the day – numbers geek I am – and see what’s up.

My day turned out to be pretty hectic, and while I didn’t eat as much as usual, but the highest it went was 114 – measured 1 hour after a greek yogurt. I consumed perhaps 1600 calories of roast beef, butter, turkey breast, mayonnaise, a zucchini, and a yogurt, and the blood glucose numbers were:

• 5:10am – 125
• 5:58am – 111 (40 min after coffee and cream)
• 6:58am – 132
• 8:26am – 96 (in work before having my shake)
• 10:03am – 106 20 min after shake)
• 10:51am – 98 (70 min after shake)
• 12:57pm – 114 (1 hr after yogurt)
• 1:33pm – 111(10 min after roast beef and butter)
• 2:39pm – 103(1 hr after turkey breast and mayo)
• 5:06pm – 112 (4 hrs after turkey breast and mayo)

Friday, March 23, 2012 – 203.4 

Let’s first look back at a few things to take stock of:

• A comment by Marochka Raduga was a tipping point of sorts in my exercising. That comment has kept me going to the gym every day. As that was March 5th, it appears I’ve been to the gym approximately 20 days in a row. If I keep it up, it’s well on the way to becoming an ingrained, unconscious habit. Once there, I can try mixing it up a bit.
• With the additional calories this week I am much more in control of my eating. Cheating hasn’t been an issue.
• I have been in deep ketosis for 5 days. For this experiment, I want to go at least 2 weeks.

Total calories for the day: 1,936.  Fat: 157g, Net carbs: 19g, Protein: 110g (72/6/22%)

Saturday, March 24, 2012 – 201.8

Up at 4:30, I tested my blood sugar – 96. As I understand it, with me being in deep ketosis, the blood glucose has to be created by my body through a process called gluconeogensis and is made from the protein I eat. My question is: is the level because I am eating too much protein? Or does my body need this level of glucose for some reason – or think it needs it?

Interesting nerd questions I don’t have the answer to. I have been stabbing my fingers a lot the past couple of days and it sure seems that, at least while on a ketogenic low carb diet, my blood glucose never goes over 120. As it appears that 140 is where the damage starts getting done, I think I’m safe – but this is a complex topic and any conclusions drawn about it are probably wrong.

Exercised early. Ate fried eggs for breakfast, then ran some family errands and we decided to take a ride to a charming open air shopping center in PA. There we stopped at a coffee house and I had maybe 1/4 cup of butternut squash soup. It was awesome soup, but it must have had some sugar in it. The family also had Quiche and croissant, which I abstained from.

I was hungry, though. Did the squash set me off – or was it the low calorie-count yesterday? After we were done and back at the car, I drank another shake for the trip home. Still hungry when home, I had some uncured ham and cheese and a bit of turkey breast. although I waited at least an hour, even that didn’t fill me up. I still had 600 calories to my goal…and was thinking about that squash soup. Wanting to at least capture a bit of that flavor, I took an entire can of organic pumpkin (14 grams of carbs) and added 2 packs of splenda, cinnamon, nutmeg, and 7 tablespoons of coconut oil – which I find for me only tastes good with sweet stuff.

Not much of a recipe, but it wasn’t bad – I could see adding some eggs to this to make a Quiche of sorts – maybe some cream cheese – I’ll have to pursue this in the future.

In general I was a little ‘off’ this day – headachy. Legs sore – perhaps from all the walking the other day. It was rainy this afternoon, which literally put a damper on our open-air mall trip – especially since my umbrella turned inside out and disintegrated as we opened it leaving the car.

Right after the 14 grams of carbs, I tested the blood sugar again: 114. Not shabby. Again right before bed: 129. Higher, but not alarmingly high.

Total calories for the day: 2,881.  Fat: 236g, Net carbs: 48g, Protein: 127g (73/9/17%)

For a brief wrap-up of the week:

• I lost 4.8 lbs – though I still have not broken through that dang 200 mark.
• On average, with an approach that doesn’t try to limit calories, I ate approximately 250 more calories – 10% more – with little eating out of plan. It was way more pleasant. No Alien hand syndrome.
• I have stayed in ketosis for 6 days.
• Fat intake was approx. 75%
• While I wanted to cut back on the shakes, it seems 2/day works out. I’ll stick with that for now.

To be continued…

So far, it’s been rough going. Frankly, a lifestyle that allows some carb works well for me on a lot of levels as my family does *not* follow a low carb diet and the stuff is all around. Controlled carbing – very low carb during the day, then a controlled portion of carbs at night – worked well enough for me last year to help me off 25 – 30 pounds.

But then it stopped. So I thought some ketogenic low carb for a while might be worth an experiment – I’ve done it many times before – I’m an old pro at this, I told myself. Ha!

I’ve kept a blow-by-blow of this, but I’ll spare you the ‘and then I ate…’ listing of a month – it didn’t get me anywhere, for the most part. I had been inhabiting the range between 204 and 208, and now I’m hovering in the 200 to 204 range – progress, but not all that much.

The cheats are easy to come by in my house, and while they’ve been infrequent, they’ve been enough to remove any expectation of the potentially rapid weight loss of continued ketogenic low carb.

While a tad bit frustrated – that magic number of being under 200 so tantalizingly close but seemingly so far, I thought it necessary to perform a bit of self-assessment to reflect on what I have accomplished. I am a person of many flaws and weaknesses - it’s not just being fat that irks me – and I try to tackle a basket full of goals at the beginning of every year.

I suppose that one can argue that trying to do too much invites failure. You might be right, but there’s another way to look at it: If you challenge yourself with 10 major things and fail at 6, you’ve still accomplished 4 major things.

If you can get over the feeling of the failed 6 and focus on the successful 4, it can bring your mojo back and show you that you can accomplish big things – perhaps not in the order you’d like, nor with the speediness you’ve decided upon with no input from your mind or body or the capriciousness of life – but it’s still worth reminding yourself of as you pick yourself up and throw your shoulder, yet again, at that particular goal that just won’t seem to give way.

So here’s my list of accomplishments in the past year, to help me through a dark and dreary February.

Gave up Alcohol (May, 2011)

I have nothing against the stuff, except that I have proven to myself time and time again that I cannot lose nor maintain a weight loss while consuming it. So I gave it up in May of 2011 – and that was probably a big help in me peeling off that 25 pounds last year. I will have a taste on the rare occasion – I was at a dinner party and had a sip of the champagne and a sip of the red wine, and on our vacation I had a few sips of a home-made ginger-infused rum that was awesome – but it’s for the flavor, not the buzz, and it’s not a habit anymore.

Gave up Nicotine (December, 2011)

The gist of this blog frequently is: “I do something stupid and you watch from the sidelines”. I’ve come to enjoy the process of experimentation in dieting – it’s become a serious hobby of mine. Unfortunately, my experiments sometimes resemble those of J.B.S. Haldane, the eccentric British scientist who used to run all sorts of dangerous experiments on himself and his family. Here’s a brief example of just a small bit of what this fellow would do:

Haldane was a keen experimenter, willing to expose himself to danger to obtain data. One experiment involving elevated levels of oxygen saturation triggered a fit which resulted in him suffering crushed vertebrae. In his decompression chamber experiments, he and his volunteers suffered perforated eardrums, but, as Haldane stated in What is Life, “the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.”

OK – I’m not that nuts, but I did think that using nicotine to control appetite might work.

Dope.

It did work for a while, but then the effectiveness diminished and left me with an addiction to the lozenges. I had tapered off slowly, going from 4 mg to 2 mg for a few months, then took to breaking the 2mg in half, then quitting completely the day after Christmas when I ran out. I’ve substituted Altoid Smalls for the ritual of popping something into my mouth, but I’ve had no urges to go out and buy more lozenges.

The other thing I did was: I gave them up without gaining weight. Most people who quit nicotine gain weight. Extra credit.

Gave up Artificial Sweeteners (December, 2011)

Artificial sweeteners are controversial. I originally lost all my weight using them. Regardless, I’ve decided to eliminate them as part of my regular diet – it’s a personal thing that comes from my desire to remove as many man-made chemicals from my life as possible.

I used to use the SodaStream sodamixes with Splenda daily, and used to use Splenda in my Greek yogurt. Now I eat the yogurt plain and just drink seltzer water – sometimes with a little lemon or lime juice. The two exceptions to this are the occasional Atkins bar, kept for emergencies only and not for regular use, and the aforementioned Altoid Smalls, which I’m hoping to eliminate as well.

So while not at absolute zero on these substances, I’ve made a major behavioral change and reduced consumption by maybe 90-95%.

Reduce Coffee Consumption (December, 2011)

This one stems from the fact that I have been an over-the-top coffee addict for 25 years. It was not uncommon for me to drink an entire pot of strong coffee before work, then drink another pot at work. Of the four things listed here, this is proving to be the toughest. I have found benefits in limiting it – there’s seems to be a magic quantity that leaves me clear-headed and calm. Too little and I am foggy and sleepy. Too much and I’m frazzled. There’s a real ‘medicinal dosage’ that, at present, it appears I need to function. So like the nicotine, I am tapering off.

I still make a pot every morning, but it’s at 60% the strength – I use 3 scoops instead of 5. I also try to drink only 2 mugs of the stuff and leave the third for the evening (I fall asleep and annoy the wife without the evening cup). In work I supplement with 1 mug (instead of 1 pot) in the late morning or early afternoon.

This one is proving a bit tough – I sometimes go over my limit, and I’m finding myself availing myself of Dunkin Donuts too frequently. There’s still an adjustment phase here, a settling in to a new routine and the arising of new bad habits, so while this one is still in progress, I can say that progress has been made – my coffee consumption is now between 50 and 75% less than it was.

So that’s an overview of where I’m at. I’m going to keep at the ketogenic low carb thing – I’ve set a goal of 2 solid weeks in ketosis for February. After a carb-laden mishap last night – today I’ll start again, and remind myself that last year I would have given my left…leg to have accomplished what I have accomplished, and with patience and dedication, more will come.

© 2012, LowCarbConfidential.com

Image credit: The wonderful people at Despair.com

On Christmas Day, 2011, I ran out of nicotine lozenges. That was it. It’s over. A very expensive and annoying addiction to nicotine lozenges, started nearly 3 years ago when I got this hare-brained idea that: if people who stop smoking gain weight because they don’t have nicotine, can people lose weight if they take nicotine?

It took thousands of dollars and a nasty addiction to the stuff – including a delightful panic attack – to come to the conclusion: Nicotine lozenges will not help you lose weight. Don’t even try.

I am spelling this out because I still get traffic to the posts where I wrote about this in my enthusiastic, early trials on the stuff. While it did have an early effect of helping to stop overeating, the addictive nature of nicotine began to overshadow the endeavor as the effect on overeating diminished, leaving me with no positive effect on my weight loss – and an expensive addiction to boot.

Maybe you want to try anyway.

Like Dirty Harry, all I can say is: “do you feel lucky?” Substitute nicotine for 44 magnum in the clip that follows.

© 2012, LowCarbConfidential.com

My Weight from Jan 1, 2010 to Feb 5, 2010

On Jan 3, I wrote this post, starting a new stab at peeling off the pounds. To spare the internet more pointless blogging, I stated that I’d write about it again only when I lost 10 lbs. It’s really only interesting then – most of us play around is a 5-pound range and it’s water weight a lot of time. But when you get to 10, some fat had to go.

This morning the scale read 222.0. I lost 10 lbs.

It took about 5 weeks to lose it. I did it in my usual half-assed way, but the weight did come off. That’s a respectable 2 pounds per week – the recommended rate. I actually chronicled many of the days, but it’s just so much blah, blah, blah that I’ll spare you and give you the short version:

The Good:

• Ate lots of kale soup with locavore pork sausage, burgers from grass-fed beef with organic onions, Fage yogurt, nitrate-free hot dogs, organic eggs, organic butter, organic lettuce, high-end low mercury tuna, sardines, smoked oysters, broiled trout – among other things low carb, on my healthy list, and forgotten.
• I’ve noticed a general lack of cravings for sweets (though I’ve had my moments)
• Some days, my appetite goes dead – I have to remind myself to eat.
• While I don’t check every day, I’ve been in ketosis on and off throughout the month.
• I’m controlling my blood sugar. In the past, I’ve woken to blood sugar as high as 157, and averaged it the 130s. Now I’m seeing blood sugar in the 80s twice in a week and my average is staying below 120.
• Indulged myself here and there. A cookie here, a Lindt chocolate ball there. Some Chinese food that probably contained carbs I could have avoided. Half a slice of pizza and the leftover pizza toppings my kids pull off. I lived a little, gave in to my cravings in moderation, and still took off 2 pounds per week. It adds a balance to my life to be able to do this and still lose weight. It’s not easy, but it seems to be getting easier.
• There is a direct correlation between my weight and my happiness. Despite the bad and the ugly below, I feel better.
• My clothes that I bought in the fall to fit me – before I put on even MORE weight – now fit again.

The Bad:

• Probably drink too much coffee, though I’ve noticed my cravings for it decline in the past month.
• Drank too much red wine, which I’m sure has slowed the rate of weight loss.
• I’m seriously torn about vitamins because I’ve come to believe we can’t trust what’s in ‘em. I have only had my vitamins a few days in the past 5 weeks. I don’t know what’s worse – taking them or not taking them.
• I don’t eat consistently. No routine. Sometimes when the appetite goes dead, I don’t eat for extended periods, which I don’t feel is good for you.
• While trying to avoid chemicals, I have indulged in the SodaStream soda mixes, nitrated deli meats, deli cheese and putting EZ-Sweetz on my Fage yogurt, though I am adapting to having the plain Fage yogurt without the sweetener – sometimes I do – sometimes I don’t.
• I have been sick with a chest cold since December. I think I’m on the verge of shaking it – but I’ve been saying this for weeks now. I’ve been the victim of the Northeast snow and freezing rain, and I’m sure having to shovel snow for hours has not helped me get better (though it might have burned some calories – quite a workout).
• I gave up the exercise when I got sick – figuring that I needed rest more than exercise – but I haven’t started up yet.
• I probably don’t eat enough veggies, with the exception of the kale soup – I’ve simplified and refined the recipe and it’s awesome. Throw some shredded cheese on top and melt it into the soup and it’s even more awesome.

The Ugly:

• The nicotine lozenges, which helped me kick the cigarette habit I briefly took up during my vacation, is now a habit.
• Unusually high levels of stress from work have not made things ideal for cutting back on the wine or the lozenges – both have to go, but right now isn’t the time – I need to get through a crisis period at work and have a clear head to tackle these.

The Curious:

• I noticed what could be coincidence – but maybe a correlation? On a number of nights after a very low carb day, I would splurge with a small high-carb treat – say 20 grams of nearly pure glucose – and in the morning my blood sugar would DROP. My unprofessional, amateur endocrinologist hypothesis is that insulin response needs periods of ‘exercise’ to keep in top shape when on a very low carb diet. Most people’s insulin response is like a chronic, obsessive exerciser – exhausted from too much working out. But on a very low carb diet, it gets time to relax and recover. The occasional Lindt chocolate ball is like moderate exercise and keeps the insulin response fit and trim – but what do I know?

So now on to the next 10 – see you at 212.

While I am not recommending long-term ketosis- Atkins doesn’t, and you’ll find few people who do as there’s little research as to what it might do to long-term health – I try to stay in Induction for extended periods – months.

Anyways, for those of you who don’t follow my blog, to summarize the last couple of years: I’ve been maintaining while trying to lose – win on one level, but a big fat fail on another.

I lost my weight in 2003, when I was a carb fiend. Such an abrupt change to low carb produced phenomenal results: 65 lbs. in the first year – another 15 in the second.

As is standard with losing weight and aging, some has crept back on. I’m still down 50 lbs. from my high in 2003, but I’m not satisfied.

So I did some looking back at what I’ve tried that succeeded, what failed miserably, what caused initial progress to evaporate, what and what traps have I fallen into again and again.

I started with a very personal list of concepts that I wrote up a few mornings ago:

Find What You Lost, Remember What You’ve Forgotten

You forgot how to live surrounded by cookies, cake and ice cream and not eat it. Remember how you had your low carb sweets and managed to stay away from the regular stuff.

Remember how you used to fill your mind with spiritual and motivational content. You’re more cynical now, it seems. It might be a good time to revisit it.

You forgot how good it felt to be thin and don’t feel it’s worth the effort so you attempt half-heartedly rather than whole-heartedly.

You forgot how poisonous the news is to your mind and how much healthier you feel on a total news diet.

You forgot how good simplicity feels, how less is more, how to live without needing so much.

Your existential crisis of the moment is because you’ve forgotten how to live in the moment, awake, and counting all the riches you have through good luck and hard work.

You’ve forgotten how good self-discipline can feel if you only hang in there and make it through the initial rough part.

You feel like a fraud because you’ve forgotten that education isn’t knowledge, degrees do not impart wisdom, and study does not inevitably lead to good judgement.

You also feel like a fraud because you’ve forgotten that setbacks do not equate to failure.

You’ve forgotten how procrastination is evil in that it fools us into thinking that ‘tomorrow’ doesn’t really mean ‘never’.

Pretty words – but the trick to ask yourself is how to make them actionable. Without actions attached to the above, it’s all just mental masturbation.

In my experience, at least for me, losing weight is mainly a head-game – a battle between who you are and who you want to be. It’s not a fair fight. Who you are at present has the home-court advantage.

Go ahead – try and break a habit. You might have initial success, but those years of ingrained habituation will wait until you are not paying attention or weak and try to sneak back in.

This is why I think the ‘Just do it’ crowd – who can’t seem to fathom that someone might be having a problem – are pinheads, in my humble opinion.

Plato said: ‘Know thyself.’ To which Oscar Wilde retorted: ‘Only the shallow know themselves.’

So, keeping this all in mind, not as discouragement, but armament against what I will inevitably come up against, I’ve turned the pretty words into some actionable, measurable goals.

So here’s my checklist for this particular try at VLCD. It’s complicated by the fact that I have been withdrawing from nicotine (from my failed nicotine-as-weight-loss-device -experiment), and my doctor recently advised me to cut way back on the coffee. (I told him I only drink a pot.)

This gives me absolutely NO substance to overconsume, which will be tough – I always had some small vice to compensate for a vice I had recently given up. Now, whatever portion of the brain controls the love of small vices, it will now go hungry.

Anyway – the rules I am trying to follow this time are:

1. One large coffee per day. Decaf is fine if I want more.
2. Resist the temptation to look at the news. It is not actionable and only depresses me.
3. Instead of reading the news, journal your progress. This has proven helpful in the past and prevents ‘forgetting’ what has been learned.
4. Measure weight once a day. Any more is noise.
5. Check blood glucose a few times a day, as I am still learning about my early-stage diabetes.
6. Eat a fatty breakfast – somewhere around 3-400 calories. Even though I’m not hungry most mornings, past experience shows I lose weight when I eat breakfast.
7. Take my vitamins after breakfast.
8. Drink at least 2 liters of water per day. Seltzer is fine.
9. Explore hunger. Meditate on it. Allow myself to be hungry. Explore the fear and learn to be unafraid. I had food, and I am going to have more food. The fear is primal. Conquer it rather than trying to eliminate it – that has been a failed strategy.
10. Don’t go more than 6 hours without eating. I’m not out to starve. The larger goal is to be healthy. The weight will follow.
11. Zero bread – even the low carb type.
12. No low carb junk food. Sorry, Atkins, this means the bars and shakes.
13. Three heaping teaspoons of fiber therapy every evening before dinner.
14. No eating after 8pm. After 8 pm is my ‘stupid time’. Here is where I am most vulnerable to the ‘just a little taste’ trap. A total prohibition prevents this.
15. Count calories without fixating on it. We’re trying to be close and use the act of counting as an awareness exercise.
16. No alcohol. While I have proven time and again I can drink alcohol and maintain, I have also proved that I cannot lose weight and have alcohol – and losing weight is the point of this.
17. Think you’re doing good and want to ‘reward’ yourself? Go ahead – but have it have NOTHING to do with what you put in your mouth. Clothes, toys, movies are fine. But don’t allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that a cheat is a ‘reward’ – this is a mind game you play on yourself, pure and simple.
18. Make this list a checklist of sorts. You should be able to go down this list daily and see if you’ve followed all the rules.

There you have it. I’m starting day 4, have been successful so far, and lost a few pounds. Right now, the coffee issue is the toughest.

It’s way too early to tell how I might bet blind-sided – caught unawares by the forces inside me that are absolutely against this plan and conspire to trip me up.

In a way – that’s kinda the fun of it.

I started what I’m calling the Food Monotony Project on Tuesday, Jan 19, and since that day I’ve eaten mostly to plan. The thinking behind this goes back to a blog post I wrote in July of 2008. I forget a lot of my posts, but the points in this one kept rattling about in my head -I kept thinking: maybe I should try out these ideas for real.

Only took me like a year and a half to get around to it.

This past week, eating during the day was some combo of Atkins shakes and bars. The evenings were mostly bologna on a slice of low carb bread. The calories from Tuesday through Thursday were below my budget of 1,683 (more on that number in a minute). Monday through Thursday worked because I ate my evening ration (hard to call it a ‘meal’) and took a nicotine lozenge right after. Friday was a blowout – way too much food in the evening – simply because I forgot the ‘lozenge after eating in the evening’ rule.

No matter – Saturday morning showed me 6 lbs down since Tuesday – and the application I am using to count calories – Lose It (see screenshot above) – tracks calories by the day and week – which put Friday night into perspective by showing me that – for the week, I was right on track – the previous few days of being below my calorie budget added up to the amount I overate on Friday.

I’m not exactly thrilled to count calories, but eating fewer foods, and foods that are easier to measure, make the task suck less. In reality I am counting carbs first, but watching my calories as well. And – except for Friday, I’ve been able to keep those carbs, on average, in the low 20s.

Lose It is a free iPhone application. I got it some time ago, played with it a little bit, and abandoned it as at the time I didn’t want to count calories. I tried a bunch of the other free diet apps and none of them worked for me – and I have as yet found none specifically low carb. I deleted the lot of them – but kept the Lose It because it was the one I liked the most. It has some nice features – it can calculate for you your recommended calorie intake to lose a given weight per week (hence the absurdly precise 1,683 calories mentioned as my budget above), it has a food library that is fairly useful and includes brand name foods, it allows you to easily add your own foods, and allows you to create your own recipes.

It also has the ability to track your exercise, so you can ‘pay back’ calorie overages by burning some calories, as well as the ability to connect online with weight loss buddies – neither of these features I have used.

It also has some maddening aspects. Look up broiled chicken breast and the serving size is ‘each’. How much does ‘each’ weight? How many cups is ‘each’? In instances like this, you can get a nutrient count elsewhere (like Nutritiondata.com) and enter it in more exact units.

Here’s a link to some screenshots of the app – the one above is direct from my iPhone.

Now – reflecting back on the week, it was a good start, but I can do way better. My food choices suck, quite frankly. Eating pre-fab Atkins products, bologna, and low carb bread ain’t exactly healthy. It won’t kill you in a week, but it’s not a sound basis for a long-term weight loss program.

So now I’m trying to line up some better choices for when the Atkins stuff and the bologna run out. I reacquainted myself with turkey breast – had 1/2 lb. with some mustard in roll-ups. I had some good quality stuff and – especially after a few days of nothing but Atkins bars and shakes for lunch – it was yummy and filling.

This morning – looking for a replacement for an Atkins shake, I took 2 eggs, scrambled them in a microwave-safe dish, tossed salt and pepper on the top and nuked in the microwave for 2 minutes. Definitively minimalist cuisine, but 2 organic eggs are probably way better for you than an Atkins shake – I keep picturing how many tanker trucks have to carry the industrial chemicals that make up any package of processed food, and think I should reduce the number of ingredients as a means to better health.

The ingredient label for my egg recipe would be: egg, salt, pepper. Nothing that sounds like something from the kid’s chemistry set. Jeez – not even a single word with more than one syllable.

For lunch I had a few celery sticks with mustard, then ate a can of Wild Planet Wild Albacore Tuna. This isn’t ordinary tuna. This tuna is ‘PC’ – ‘sustainably caught’, ‘dolphin-safe’, ‘turtle-safe’, ‘no long lines’ – and even the can states proudly that it’s ‘Certified BPA free’. And as an added bonus, this stuff is a product of the good ‘ol U S of A.

There’s nothing wrong with any of the above, of course. I like dolphin and turtles, love my country, and I hate long lines at the grocery store as much as the next guy. But what justifies 4 bucks for a 5 oz. can of tuna is that it contains half the mercury of your typical can of tuna – and way more omega 3 – one can has 3,460 mg of omega 3, which breaks out into 2,320mg DHA and 720mg EPA. My understanding is that it’s the way they handle the fish.

Typical tuna fish is made from fish that are cooked on the boat, then when they get back to the cannery, it’s plopped into cans and cooked again. The process removes the omega 3s, which is OK for the manufacturers – they sell the stuff to supplement companies. They might throw in some vegetable oil to replace the omega 3s, which you would probably be better off without.

The Wild Planet tuna is tasty stuff, moist and juicy. I just ate the can by its lonesome – it was still good. While you might balk at the price (I did), it might be reasoned that: I’m eating less, I should go for the highest quality, and since I’m buying less, the cost probably evens out.

In the evening I broiled up some Trader Joe’s (If you don’t know: a quirky grocery chain in the US that can be described as ‘Jimmy Buffet Meets Whole Foods’) chicken breast heavily seasoned with Trader Joe’s Poultry Grill and Broil – a melange of seasonings that eliminates the need for me to think about what seasoning to use. I then used olive oil spray to coat one side of the breast in a thin film of oil. About 40 minutes in the broiler with one flip along the way resulted is some very moist, tender, and juicy chicken. I had a small bit, but refrigerated the rest.

Dinner, if you can call it that, was the last of the bologna on a slice of low carb bread along with some Trader Joe’s Grilled Eggplant.

Here’s the kicker: all the food ended up to be about 1200 calories, which for a guy my size should be too little – but I wasn’t hungry.

At this point it seems that the combo of carb and calorie counting seems to be working splendidly – and switching out high fat foods for less fat foods seems to increase the amount of food I could eat considerably. Don’t get me wrong – it was still high fat – 75% of my calories for the day came from fat, according to Lose It.

Right now I’m thinking that the appetite-suppressing properties of ketosis makes cutting back on calories easier.

Anyway, it’s the start of a new week, where I want to focus on better food choices and start working some veggies back into the mix. And while I am pleased that my weight is just a hare’s breath under what the BMI terms ‘obese’, I’ve been able to get here with a little effort before.

It’s crossing the threshold into under 200 that has eluded me for over a year.

But I have a new approach – one that shows a lot of potential. Let’s see what happens.

During this time, the thoughts about what to do different this time led me back to something I rejected long ago, as well as something I wrote on 2 years ago. The first thought was on a post about food monotony, that is, food as a utility. It’s a notion I had that part of the problem about dieting is that you replace one food obsession – eating too much – with another type – eating the correct types and quantities. I speculated that just thinking about food less might be many naturally thin people’s way of keeping slim.

As an exercise to test this, I decided that to limit my food intake to some simple, basic – even boring choices – if I can get used to it, might make my ‘live-to-eat mindset’ shift more to an ‘eat-to-live’ mindset.

The second thought surrounded a long-reviled concept that I thought might just help: calorie-counting. When I went on low carb 6+ years ago and peeled off 80+ lbs., I didn’t count calories – I counted carbs – just like Atkins said. Well after a year of flatlining of my attempt to take off the 30 lbs I put on since my inital 80+ loss, I wondered if perhaps it might help to count the calories and the carbs.

Yeah – I know – heresy. In the low carb world, you don’t have to do that. But I think I might. The reason being: I think I’ve tricked myself into thinking that I’m doing low carb right – when I’m doing no such thing.

Part of it, I think, is the way the Atkins book is written. In it, he puts forth the proposition that you just count carbs – not calories – but then spends a lot of time discussing portion control. Isn’t portion control controlling calories?

In reflection, I was better at portion control the last time around. Perhaps because I was consciously working at low carb, learning the ropes, so to speak. Now I can live low carb effortlessly, unconsciously – but without conscious focus, I’m simply taking in too much calories.

And while I believe that Atkins does give you a metabolic advantage, it can only go so far.

So along with food monotony and calorie counting, I have one more arrow in my quiver: nicotine.

I wrote about nicotine last year – how effectively it can kill appetite – as well as how I didn’t lose weight using it. I’ve also written about this failure in greater detail recently, but haven’t published it yet. A conclusion I’ve come to is that I just need to come up with a better ‘dosing schedule’. I have to be clear on when to take it and when not to take it.

I have almost a year’s experience in how not to take it – I have some good ideas on how to take it to assist ketosis in appetite suppression.

So these concepts ran through my head from the beginning of the year until this past weekend. That’s it – I really didn’t act on them.

Then I got way sick Saturday night from some stomach flu that left me with a fever on Sunday. I slept most of the day, and food, coffee, and nicotine lozenges were out of the picture.

This involuntary fast was cleansing in a way. I survived deprivation of these items without feelings of withdrawal. That was reassuring, and gave me the impetus to try to implement the new regimen I’ve been kicking about since the New Year.

So Monday, I cut back my coffee consumption to 4 cups of black coffee a day – in the morning. If that still seems like a lot, I used to drink 8 cups every morning, then go to work and probably down another pot before the afternoon. So now I’m drinking a quarter of what I used to drink as little as a year and a half ago.

Tuesday I decided to try the food monotony bit by taking the approach of: food in work is ‘eat-to-live’. Try living on Atkins shakes and bars during the day. That’s it. You won’t starve, but it’s not ‘dining’. It’s sustenance – that’s it.

In the evening – eat light. Maybe a little less than recommended just to begin.

Lastly – use the nicotine lozenges sparingly, but at the right time.

So I did this. During the day on Tuesday, I had nothing but a shake in the AM with my vitamins, then a bar in the afternoon about 2pm – I try to adhere to the Atkins rule of ‘wait no longer than 6 hours to eat’. After the bar, I had a lozenge. When I got home, I ate very sparingly – just some bologna (one of my favorite comfort foods) and a piece of low carb bread. Right after I ate this, I had another lozenge.

While I need to swap in better food choices in the evening, at the least, conceptually, this first pass at a new approach seemed successful. I’m drinking half the coffee, one-third of the nicotine, and probably less than half the calories. Let’s try this another day and see where the flaws in my thinking lie.

Apparently I lied.

Anywho, I have been quite adherent to an Atkins induction-style diet, and have been in ketosis for about 8 days straight. When I started this, about 10 days ago, I had puffed up to 218.6 due to a ‘what-the-hell’ attitude, which I find I sometimes have to indulge to an extreme to exorcise it.

I believe: if you give in to ‘what-the-hell’, don’t do it half-hearted – go for it!

You will probably feel like crap the next day – a great way to steel one’s resolve and get back to your diet.

Last night I got on the scale and was 207.8 – nearly 11 lbs. down. Yesterday I was able to actually fit into a pair of pants that 2 weeks ago were cutting off circulation to my lower extremities – a nice indicator of progress.

So what have I been doing?

First things first, as I’ve mentioned before, I can’t lose weight and drink alcohol, so I’ve ditched the wine. When I reach my goal, I can have wine, because I can maintain, but I cannot lose if I drink wine regularly. It’s a simple equation: if I have wine, my diet will stall, so deferring this pleasure will provide me the larger gratification of fitting in a pile of clothes that I’ve had to abandon ’cause I can’t jam my fat ass in them anymore.

If I look back on what I have been eating, there’s been a lot of organic beef and eggplant – both my pseudo chili and my Italian stew included it. I’ve also made some cod in a mayo/parm/butter sauce, which was great. See this recipe for the details (I just used cod instead of tilapia).

I’ve still had some low carb bread, and maybe a tad bit more cheese than Atkins recommends, but again, I’m 10 lbs. down in 10 days – maybe not as rapid a weight loss as I’ve had in the past, but I’m getting older and my body is pretty used to low carb, so I can’t expect the same kind of rapid weight loss I had when I started as was going from a diet with over 200 grams of carbs per day.

I’ve also had bologna, what I consider to be a ‘crap’ food, but it is acceptable on a low carb diet. I’ve found foods like this help me transition to healthier eating – call them crutches, but since when are crutches a bad thing? If your legs are weak, they help you get where you want to go. When your legs strengthen, you don’t need them anymore.

So why are crutches a bad thing?

I’ve also been having an Atkins shake and my vitamins every day about 9am. I had experimented with life without vitamins – big mistake – I felt worse.

I have also been drinking a pot or more of coffee with heavy cream – maybe up to 8 tablespoons a day.

And – I am still using the nicotine lozenges to reduce hunger, with focus on the evening, when I have the most potential to become truly gluttonous.

I have not:

• Eaten regular bread or other refined starches
• Exercised at all
• Drank water other than for thirst

I have also been watching my blood glucose – not that I am diabetic, but my doctor’s prediction is, with my family history, I will be.

I’d like to prove him wrong.

Well, each morning, it is just a few digits above 100 – at least 20 points lower than when I eat a lot of carbs. This is considered normal by both American Diabetes Association, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and the American College of Endocrinology – at least according to this article.

Now here’s an interesting thing: there were 2 days where it was below 100 – once it was 93 and once 87.

On both days, I had carbs the previous evening. Grapes one time and store-bought whipped cream in a can the other. Neither time pulled me out of ketosis – the amount of carbs was small, but it was not the slow-absorption carbs – it was the high impact carbs of sugar.

Now – two events don’t make for much of a pattern, but it does seem odd that a small amount of carbs before bed appears to make my blood sugar go down the next morning. Actually, I have noticed this in the past.

Geez – Matt Stone mentioned in a comment on this post something about carbs helping insulin response – is there something there? I’ll have to continue to keep tabs on this one.

I’ve also been checking my blood pressure and it’s fine for a guy who has hypertension and drinks a pot of coffee every day. Even after a lot of coffee and 2 hours sucking on a nicotine lozenge, my BP the other day was 116/72 with a pulse rate of 80. As your body supposedly acclimates itself to caffeine, and low carb brings on a tendency toward hypotension (or so I’ve heard – I have no sources for this), the resultant blood pressure numbers might not be all that odd.

I have noticed some unexpected bursts of energy, which usually come during ketosis periods – as well as mild headaches, which I don’t treat (I don’t take aspirin, Tylenol, or NSAIDS). I’ve also noticed my Tums usage drop to near zero. In the past, both a low carb diet and being under 200 make heartburn completely disappear.

I’d like to think if I can keep this up through November, I can pass through that dreaded 30.0 BMI – I HATE the word ‘obese’ – and just be ‘overweight’ – and actually see a number under 200.

With the Halloween candy Orgyfest on Saturday and the holiday season approaching, it ain’t gonna be easy, but what am I going to do – give up?

here’s my summary: My Last Post on Nicotine.

On April 13th of this year I started experimenting with nicotine, in the form of Commit lozenges, as a means to help stave off food cravings. As of today, 6 months later, I would say this:

• The 4mg lozenges, taken on average 4 times per day, do reduce food cravings
• I have lost no weight since starting this

The conclusions drawn from this can be many – especially because nicotine has moral implications.

It’s a ‘bad’ chemical – as if a particular molecular structure carries with it any morality. We’ve been so trained that smoking is bad, and that nicotine is in cigarettes, and nicotine is addictive – bad, bad, bad.

Our morality tells us: of course it didn’t work. It’s a bad thing, that nicotine, and it doesn’t do anyone any good – not even in this case. And so far, the evidence does point to the fact it doesn’t work – by 6 months of data and a scale that Does Not Lie.

But putting our moral confirmation bias aside, there’s something here that is intriguing: if it does reduce food cravings, why didn’t I lose weight?

Someone once said that a conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking. Conclusions allow the mind to go back to sleep, ‘knowing’ they’ve solved the problem.

Fact is: most of what we conclude is WRONG. Look at the people around you – is it not true that you view nearly all of them as having some deep inability to comprehend certain things? Some blinders that they wear?  Some view held that makes you think that they have a screw loose?

What makes you think you are any different?

These are conclusions I’ve come to with myself – and it makes me certainly more forgiving of others, being that I, myself suffer the same diseases of thought and mind blindness that they do. But being aware I have this condition makes me more cautious as to conclusions I draw, and less ego-driven about them. I change my mind regarding my conclusions easier.

That might make me soft-headed to some of you: I’m OK with that – it is what it is.

But back to nicotine. The digression was important, I think, because many of you probably feel that the whole nicotine thing was dumb and I’ve proved it – why beat a dead horse?

But the fact remains – it did kill appetite.

So – I’m OK with coming to the conclusion that: it doesn’t work.

But another in competition in my mind is this: I am not using it properly. That bring to mind another possible conclusion: any appetite suppressant, used improperly, is worthless.

That’s an interesting conclusion for those of you who might be considering other techniques or compounds that claim to do the same thing.

For me, evenings are the worst. And what I have found is that I tend to avoid taking them in the evening – the EXACT time I should be taking them to prove their worth. So the next experiment with nicotine should be: if I take them at my worst time, do they work?

A point that comes out of this as well – if I have been avoiding them at my worst times, my weakest moments, then until I test that hypothesis, I have been committing some sort of unconscious self-sabotage – at least until now, where it has risen to my conscious mind, gone through the Internet, and ended up in this blog post.

Woah. This is getting complicated.

So – yet again – I am going to try to refine my approach to the nicotine – and try to focus using it mostly in the evenings.

Oh – and as to the addictive properties of the stuff, I have had 4-5 of these 4mg lozenges just about every day since April. That’s 16-20 mg of nicotine daily. I usually had 3-4 before 6pm. I would start at 9am or so and each  lasts me about 2 hours. On Friday, I forgot them. After a minor panic, I said to myself: OK – today is an impromptu experiment in nicotine lozenge addiction. What will withdrawal be like?

The answer: no big deal. I thought about it maybe twice. Nothing like quitting smoking – which I did in my youth and it was Hell. The difference might be the delivery. If a 4mg lozenge lasts me 2 hours, I am getting 2mg per hour and a pretty constant rate. Smokers, on the other hand, get a rush of nicotine – maybe 1mg to  2mg – in about 10 minutes. Perhaps my lower but more consistent level isn’t enough to become heavily addictive – or there are other compounds in smoking that might play a role in the addiction.

I have more questions than answers – I know. But this blog was never about answers – I’m more interested in the questions.

There might be something to learn there.

A reader left a comment on my post ‘The Nicotine Experiment: Can it Help You Lose Weight?‘ that I wrote in April. At the time, I was trying out the coconut-oil as an experiment in reducing hunger, as well as starting experimentation with the Commit nicotine lozenges for hunger control. I’ve since abandoned the coconut oil, but am still playing around with the lozenges. I’m only a few pounds down from the weight on that date, so all appearances point to the experiment being an utter failure, but I’m not sure yet – I don’t think I’ve quite gotten the timing and dosing down yet – so the jury is still out on this.

A reader left a comment on the post:

How is the weight loss going? Your diet sounds horrible. Fasting, or eat oil for a meal is NOT going to help you lose weight; neither will using a Commit. Sure, it curbs the hunger for now, but in essence you’re doing what dopey models do; starving themselves. You may see some losses now, but beware the boomerang effect often associated with crappy diets like yours.

So here’s my response:

The coconut oil thing didn’t last. It was an experiment based on someone else’s self-experimentation.

I’m pretty much where I started with regards to weight.

I do try things that don’t sound particularly hazardous and see what happens. Sometimes they don’t pan out.

If you adhere to a low carb approach, oil, veggies, fat and protein doesn’t seem all that crappy.

As I’ve kept a minimum of 50 lbs off for 5 years so far, was medically supervised, and my bloodwork was perfect, I can only conclude that dieting along the lines that I am trying works for me.

Considering the amount of calories I eat, I wouldn’t call what I do ‘starving myself’ – though I do have the majority of calories in the evening.

Using Commit *has* proved interesting – for me it make that the need for teeth-clenching ‘willpower’ when surrounded by goodies lessened considerably – and losing weight while being hungry is not some sort of moral badge of honor that I want to be awarded.

A big part of my diet approach is to avoid the boomerang – which I have done with 50 lbs – It was more, so there was a boomerang, but it was way slower than the one I faced when I lost weight twice calorie-counting – each time all the weight was back in a year – I just couldn’t sustain it.

I think I’d agree with your comment completely – if I was new to this. I’m not.

You  might also be posting this as a warning to others – I appreciate that. I’m long over the ‘evangelical’ phase of low carb. I don’t want to convince anybody of anything. Low carb doesn’t work for everyone – I know that. My point in this blog (If I have one) is to document my ‘going it alone’, and trying to come up with new ways of thinking about nutrition, weight loss, and exercise – and testing my ideas on myself.

I am not trying to get people to ‘follow me’ – I actively discourage people from doing so.

I can only infer as to your own diet – it’s probably ‘healthy’ by traditional standards. If it works for you  - great. It’s a hell of a lot harder doing low carb because you exhaust yourself listening to people try to debunk it all the time.

I also like the zinger of ‘dopey model’ – I’ve thought about that one, though, and it doesn’t quite fit.

I still like it, though.

Please write back if you would like to clarify your comments.

Regards,

LCC