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

Heck, it didn’t work the last time – so it makes sense to try it again, doesn’t it?

Day 1 – Thursday, Sept 17

So anywho – day 1 was , well, awful. The day part was OK – I eat light throughout the day at work – I usually just bring cheese and have a few slices. I have coffee and cream in the morning, and black coffee in the afternoon, equalling a pot a day.

After work, I stopped on the way home and picked up a pizza for ‘the kids’ – that apparently meant me though I didn’t know it. It was enjoyable pizza – all 4 slices, made more enjoyable by the wine that accompanied it.

I did take my vitamins, but I did not take my fiber – I didn’t forget – just didn’t want to.

Great start to that new steely resolve, that iron will, I said I would find in my last post.

Stats:
Morning weight:216.8

Day 2 – Friday, Sept. 18

Zero gain, zero loss. New attempt at resolve involved me buying about $50 worth of Atkins shakes and bars – mostly shakes. Logic being: if I am going to eat  crap – eat Atkins crap.

While I believe this to have worked for me in the past, I doubt the Atkins organization (who I have a respect and fondness for) will be using that tagline in any of their advertising anytime soon.

So I had a shake for breakfast, and a candy bar for lunch. The bar was surprisingly filling – I wasn’t hungry all afternoon, though I did take a nicotine lozenge right after the Atkins bar.

Came home and went right out again – took a walk downtown. When I got home, it was late, and had 2 open-faced ham sandwiches with american cheese and mustard. Had my fiber then. As a contractual obligation-type gesture, I had a pickle to satisfy my veggie requirement.

Technically, an OK day.

Stats:
Morning weight:216.8

Day 3 – Saturday, Sept. 19

I am going to make another change – no more cream in my coffee. I love it, but I like black coffee too, and it’s just unnecessary calories.

I am also going to watch my blood sugar – I am not a diabetic, but I bought one of the test kits anyway because it runs in my family and I think that a low carb diet can stave off the onset of the disease.

I’m also considering what else to track – I’ve tracked so many different things in the past…which ones are the most valuable?

I was thinking of measuring stress – but how do you accurately do that?

On a scale of 1-10, Id say the stress today was 10. I felt like a clubbed baby seal – stunned into a passive zombie-like stupor in the evening from the day’s proceedings. I anticipate work continuing in this fashion until some time in October, so it’s just a matter of hanging in there until the crunch subsides.

Nice surprise from my scale – a 4 lb. drop from the day before. Don’t be too impressed – I have a supernatural ability (for a Man) to retain water. As I understand it, when you eat carbs, your body must retain water to manage them – something like 4 molecules of water for every molecule of carbs. Ditch the carbs, and the water has nothing to hold onto.

It’s the weekend, and the availability of food, and all the rituals of food that involve the weekend make it hard.  We’ll see…

Stats:
Morning weight:212.8 – 4.0 lbs down from yesterday.
Blood glucose: 97

So I put on the weight I lost earlier. This entire year has been spent between about 223 and 201 lbs.

This morning’s weight – as recorded by Weightbot – my iPhone app for recording my daily weight: 216.6.

Pretty much my married weight – but I had gotten down to 180 – that’s where I want to be.

Boring – I know. As of late, I was thinking of renaming the blog ‘LowCarbFAIL’ – so little here to inspire anyone lately.

It’s not that I’ve given up on low carb – I am as firmly convinced as ever that it is the one way I can lose weight and keep it off, but I haven’t had the requisite discipline – a symptom, I believe, of all the other things going on.

How do you muster up the discipline when you feel as if you are hanging on for dear life?

I don’t know how exactly, but I’m going to try to muster up the wherewithal and start – yet again – today.

I wrote a brief list of core rules and I’m going to start there. Hopefully, they will give me the momentum to get back in the groove – and leave the kid’s cookies the hell alone.

1. Eat breakfast, dammit. I wrote myself that it’s important to do so, but I skip it anyway.
2. Take my vitamins. I experimented with stopping vitamins and I felt like hell – I got the 2 I think have the most impact yesterday: COQ10 and ALA-ALC and I’m going to take them religeously along with my standard set – which I haven’t been taking either.
3. A big glass of fiber therapy daily – I am firmly convinced that volumetric eating does not work for me. I’m just hungry and bloated. Saiety for me is not a full stomach. I take it for the fiber, and the fact that it is known to reduce serum cholesterol.
4. Veggies. I know I need them – but I skip them and fill up on crapola. Green veggies, cauliflower, brocolli, mushrooms, peppers, tomatoes. Ramp up on the salads.
5. Quality meats, fish and eggs. I have a large slab of organic buttercup brie, made by a local farm from their own cows and raw milk – it doesn’t get any better than that – and I pass it up to eat Oreos?!?
6. Nicotine lozenges – keep to 4 per day and under – and use them correctly as my personal research has revealed. I talked about this in previous posts, and the darn things are the best damn appetite suppressant I’ve ever come across. But I haven’t been using them correctly. I purposely don’t take them when they are most needed – at night – when I go on a search-and-destroy mission for food.

I’m also going to go back and read some of my own good advice that I’ve written here and try to take it.

Wish me luck.