I violate the laws of physics

The above chart is pretty much the entire month of April as per my daily honest as humanly possible calorie-counting, my exercise tally, and my activity total based upon my little exercise spy – my Fitbit. This chart comes from the Fitbit website.

There’s a little bit of a problem with this chart. It shows how many calories I burned in the dark green (and somewhat steady) line. The more erratic line is my food intake. You should also notice that I’ve burned 83,000 calories but only eaten 66,000 calories – that’s 80% of the calories I supposedly needed to maintain my weight.

That’s great! If we believe in food calories, then I shouldn’t even have to go near a scale: I subtract how many calories I ate from how many I burned (83,109-66,133=16,976). I then take those 16,976 calories and divide that by how many calories are in a pound: 3,500.

And thus, I know that I have lost 4.85 pounds. That’s great – except I didn’t. My average weight hasn’t changed a bit.

I’m continuing to count calories because I find it interesting to prove just how pointless it is. If calories have a direct cause and effect relationship with a person’s weight – I haven’t seen it.

I do believe that the total grams of food consumed, as well as the proportions, should have some relationship, but I’ll be dipped if I can see what it is just yet – and if you were to say it’s because I can’t keep to any fixed eating pattern for even a week at a time – you’re right.

Sunday, April 29, 2012 – 208.2

I was 208.2 when I weighed myself at the usual time, then by midmorning I was 206. Those potato rolls I had last night soaked up fluids like a sponge, and the water weight would disappear if I minded my Ps and Qs and avoided carbs.

I went and exercised early. Instead of 3 sets of 10 I did 2 sets of 15 – for no particular reason at all.

My wife and I took a ride to the store when I came back – she wanted to bake more and needed butter. I wanted to make chili and wanted to get some jalapeno peppers. We came back with some cooked bacon as well, and I made my chili while my wife baked, and I had 3 strips of backed with some sliced tomato. A BLT is an awesome thing, and I was halfway there – and in case you’ve never tried it, bacon, lettuce, mayo and tomato without the bread but just wrapped in a lettuce leaf, has almost all the goodness of the sandwich – a great low carb trick if you’re jonesin’ for a BLT.

The low carb tricks for the day ended when the baked goods started coming out of the oven. I indulged in corn bread along with a very spicy low carb chili I made. Quite good. More baked goods and crab-stuffed mushrooms were had, and while I enjoyed my bacchanalian feast, I resolved to ‘get down to business’ for the last 2 weeks. Yeah, right.

Total grams for the day: 514 (18.1oz). Total calories: 2,724. Fat: 114g, Net carbs: 235g, Protein: 165g (22/45/32%)

Monday, April 30, 2012 – 207.2

As I’ve mentioned previously, I have a little ritual where every week I fold a little booklet out of a sheet of paper and write my goals for the week. Last week I just wrote ‘set better goals’ which was a cop-out. Perhaps *I* am little sick of myself at present – and sick of my own good-natured acceptance of my blase attitude toward failure. Am I stringing myself along? Am I taking advantage of my own good nature?

On this morning, when contemplating my goals, I wrote ‘I will be under 200 by May 5′. This is absurd, of course – readers who have been following this magnum opus of weight loss failure know how this will turn out – as do I.

As I thought about how stupid it is to set an unrealistic goal, I also thought of a comment that I made: I never go hungry.

There are different types of hunger. I thought I’d experiment with it. Why not?

I had a yogurt in work about mid morning, then I had a bit more than a cup of the hot chili from yesterday. Later in the day I gnoshed on half a cucumber with salt.

I didn’t eat again until 9pm, and I watched my hunger in between and how it felt.

The hunger felt scary, as if some part of me thought it would never get fed again. The hunger also passed for a time – a few hours. When the hunger came back, it was more shrewd and negotiated with me, convincing me that 700 calories is way too low – and that pizza you picked up for the kids isn’t that bad.

I had 3 slices and a small glass of milk. My wife, either reading my mind or reading my blog, said: “you’re lowering yourself for that?”

It was a good question, perfectly timed. I considered it: yes – this was worth it. This was good pizza, locally made, not Big Corporate pizza.

Total grams for the day: 354 (12.5oz). Total calories: 1,959. Fat: 87g, Net carbs: 131g, Protein: 136g (25/37/38%)

Tuesday, May 1, 2012 – 205.0

The beginning of a month is like any other day, really, but it can also be a great demarcation point, breaking the past from the future. I can say that I have been blessed in that I have shown – in the months I have been recording this as well as all the months I wasn’t recording this yet was doing more or less the same – that I have successfully reset my weight point from 265 and with only the slightest bit of discipline on occasion, can maintain my weight at an average of 206.

I wasn’t recording how I ate and did this for 6 months. Now I have 11 weeks of one hell of a decadent weight loss maintenance log as proof that – yes – you *can* lose weight, keep it off, and still eat 10 Lindt chocolate balls in one sitting. No bulimia involved. No periods of starvation. No mental anguish. All rather pleasant.

While you may question the wisdom of eating 10 Lindt chocolate balls, it is nice to know that a thinner life does not prevent one from this type of indulgence.

Diet food.

There’s only two tiny problems that elude me at present:

1. I don’t quite know how I manage to eat what I do and maintain my weight loss
2. I *still* want to lose more

Wednesday, May 2, 2012 – 205.0

Oops. After eating all that food yesterday – it sure felt like a lot – I’m the same weight. I must have broken the laws of physics again for those ‘calories-in-calories out’ people. Sorry.

On the way to work I picked up roast beef and grass-fed butter. I had that for breakfast, along with butter in my coffee.

During the day I read this tidbit in an article in Msnbc.com on mad cow disease discovered in a dairy cow last week:

The USDA still allows chickens to consume the remains of cattle. Chicken litter, containing urine and feces, is fed to cows. That could theoretically transmit the infection to cattle.

…So let me get this straight. They feed chicken dead cows. Then they feed chickenshit to live cows.

Is this why the ‘regular’ ground beef is so cheap compared to the grass-fed or organic versions?

Anyway, I didn’t flinch as I ate the grocery store roast beef. Maybe I should have.

Afternoon was more beef and butter, a yogurt, and a can of oysters. I didn’t get any exercise – it was too rainy to walk so I  didn’t and I skipped the gym as I went yesterday.

In the evening I went a bit off the rails, having my last tin of tuna bought on our vacation in December. This stuff comes with its own mayo and sweet peppers and is yummy, though this one in particular tasted like it reacted with the can – a bit metallic. I followed with two hot dogs in lettuce leafs with mozzarella cheese, then maybe a bit too much dark chocolate. I also wasted time on a taste of my wife’s cornbread and her home-made bread. A bit later were a few almond cookies. I’ve indulged worse, but really, the carbs I had for the most part just weren’t worth it.

Total grams for the day: 365 (12.9oz). Total calories: 2,548. Fat: 189g, Net carbs: 75g, Protein: 101g (52/21/27%)

Thursday, May 3, 2012 – 203.8

Unfortunately, at this point in the week, the same pattern began to emerge – good during the day, not-so-good at night. I could really take most any other day here and enter it here. The calories were over 3000 and the carbs probably around 150. This repeated Friday and Saturday as well.

Conclusion

So I’ve decided to end the daily tally early. It’s becoming a distraction – and more than a little repetitive.

And it certainly has not provided the results I set out to acheive.

I think this experiment has led to a number of interesting conclusions. I want to go through the data and sum some of them up. I’ll do that in the near future.

Don’t think for a minute that I’ve given up on my weight loss goal. That’s not going anywhere.

I started this week pretty much where I started every week doing this public performance of diet-flailing: 208.

I was still in the range I’ve been in for 8 months. What changed was not my weight, obviously.

And maybe that was OK. Maybe this wasn’t about the struggle to take off a few pounds. Maybe this was about the ability to struggle without despair. To enjoy the struggle. To keep trying without getting wrapped up in my obsession.

What the hell does that mean?

I just finished an important book: The Obesity Myth by James Campos. A law professor and a former fat guy, he wrote a case for the prosecution. The defendant is the title of the book: the obesity myth – the notion that we are a nation of fat sedentary and unhealthy individuals, and if we only stepped away from the table occasionally and got some exercise, we’d all be thin.

This book is out of print. Not because it’s a bad book: it’s an interesting read, and one that I think everyone who is on a diet or considering going on one should read.

It’s out of print because it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. It calls out the entire diet industry as perpetrating a fraud on people, defining ideal weight as something unattainable to the vast majority of Americans, painting even the slightly overweight as suffering from the same health issues as those people grossly overweight and unfit, and condemning millions of people to a life of shame, self-hatred, damaged health, and counterintuitive, weight gain through perpetual useless dieting.

It’s one Hell of an indictment. In fact, it can be described as an old friend of mine would say: ‘Like a turd in a punchbowl.’

No wonder it’s out of print. Nobody wants to read this. An entire industry has been created around the myth that being fat has a direct correlation to being unhealthy, but professor Campos makes clear that there is little health difference between a fat person who eats healthy and exercises and a thin person who eats healthy and exercises, while there is a BIG difference between that healthy fat person and a thin person who eats junk and is sedentary.

There’s a lot of people who want to believe this myth – including its victims: us fat people.

If you are reading this, you’re probably fat and want to be thin – that is: if you haven’t abandoned these posts because I have ‘failed’ in my weight loss – and who wants to see that?

If you are ‘fat’ and still reading, let me ask you: are you really fat? Or is it that you don’t meet a cultural ideal, an airbrushed magazine cover of what ‘healthy’ looks like?

Assuredly there will be more on this from me. I’ve done a lot of reading in this area. These diet deniers write wonderful, insightful books that quickly go out of print, but given the wonderful ability to buy second-hand books over the Internet – I have a few of them.

I am also not just having my head turned by some recent idea I’ve been exposed to – which does occur with me, to be honest. No – there’s a thread throughout this blog that I do not condone weight-loss-at-any-price – despair and self-hatred are verboten. The ability to enjoy food and not being hungry are paramount. The occasional overindulgence encouraged. That’s why low carb is so freaking awesome. Give up pasta for bacon? Sure! Sign me up! If I gotta make a choice there, it’s an easy one.

Sunday, April 22, 2012 – 208.2

Anywho – to the mundanity of daily eats.

Five thousand calories the previous day leave a man a bit unhungry in the AM…I broke my fast around 12:30 with some prosciutto, followed by some of the grocery store roaster. I then experimented with a coconut milk ice cream. I tried it with a little stevia, but I really don’t like stevia, and having more or less ruined it at the outset, I regressed to childhood and threw whatever in: cinnamon, cocoa powder, cayenne pepper. My wife and older daughter tried it. “Interesting.” was the guarded response from both.

I think it sucked, actually – for me, stevia ruins the flavor even more so than cayenne pepper in ice cream would.

It might have been better with no sweetener at all, or been that one rare use for splenda.

My wife and I cooked in the afternoon. I made some grass-fed burgers and grocery store spicy Italian sausages on the grill,  and had 2 of the burgers and ultimately 2 of the sausages. My wife, now officially off her 6-week Ultramind diet, made a brioche as an experiment. I had some – it was quite good though she was disappointed it didn’t rise all that much. It went well with some butter. We played cards – ‘progressive rummy’ – a card game we learned at our friends house the previous night. My wife won and I was the big loser. Then we went to bed.

Total grams for the day: 283 (10oz). Total calories: 1,750. Fat: 113g, Net carbs: 34g, Protein: 136g (40/12/48%)

Monday, April 23, 2012 – 208.2

The most notable aspect of this day was my mood – it was in the shitter. OK, it was a Monday, it was rainy, and I needed to start putting together a big, complicated project that felt akin to starting to clean a garage or basement: where the hell to begin? This isn’t an unusual feeling to have in similar past situations, so I chalked it up to ‘situational stress’ and figured I’ll get a head of steam on this eventually and I just need to weather the emotions.

Eats during the day were a combo of leftover sausage and hamburger as well as yogurt and 1/2 of a very large cucumber with salt.

I skipped exercise on the way home – and I didn’t go out of a walk because of the weather. I was conflicted about this, of course: I’m was in a crappy mood and when like this it’s best to get the most mileage out of little things by turning them into big things. That’s what a good funk is good for – right?

At home with the kids, however, I felt better. I had a burger with some cheese and a small piece of the brioche from the other day – there was only a little piece left – it wasn’t restraint that prevented me from eating more.

When my wife came home she brought a key lime pie and I had a piece. It was pretty good – not great, however. We’re the carbs worth it? In this case, probably no.

Total grams for the day: 303 (10.7oz). Total calories: 1,761. Fat: 97g, Net carbs: 68g, Protein: 138g (32/22/46%)

Tuesday, April 24, 2012 – 204.0

Today sucked less than yesterday, which I attribute as to making some good progress on the project in work. I walked at work, though 2/3rds of what I usually do. I had just a yogurt and 3 of the spicy Italian sausages I cooked up on the weekend – that was it for the day. In the evening I went and exercised. Because there was a guy on one of the machines I used, I upped my reps to 20 from 10 – and was surprised to see I could actually do it. Perhaps the rest in between had helped?

At home I cooked up some ground beef I got over the weekend on the grill and had 2 burgers with ketchup. I also had a small piece of the kid’s leftover pizza – my thinking here, oddly, was a fallback to when I lost 30 pounds last year: a portioned indulgence, eaten with fat. It wasn’t all that much. I had jumped on the scale in the evening and I was down to 201.6 – why is the weight suddenly dropping off me now? Despite all this documenting, I’ll be damned if I know.

A few strange items: the past 2 nights I’ve had these long involved dreams, something I don’t usually have. I also was wondering if I am subconsciously fixating on my BMI being under 30. While I know this is in many ways a worthless number, it was a milestone for me to get under 30 – and under 30, right under 30 – is where I’ve been for months.

I decided to change my height in my weight tracking program. I mad myself an inch shorter. Now my BMI is over 30. Let’s see if I do what I usually do when I see that: get the number under 30. I know: weird.

Total grams for the day: 239 (8.4oz). Total calories: 1,761. Fat: 94g, Net carbs: 26g, Protein: 119g (39/11/50%)

Wednesday, April 25, 2012 – 202.2

On Monday I was 208.2. By Tuesday night I was 201.6. Whatever the reason for the precipitous drop (magic key lime pie, perhaps?), it usually swings up at this point.

Certainly my hunger did.

Something I rarely mention is that I *never* starve myself. Never on low carb have I allowed myself to suffer from hunger. I’ve managed it – eating some and waiting a bit, or attempting portion control, but if my hunger continued, I ate – and I measured my success on what I ate, not how much.

This was a day I could not control the hunger.

I started with an Atkins shake for breakfast in the car. I had also forgotten my ear buds in work the day before and was forced to listen to staticy radio for my entire hour commute – and I listened to the news. Bad idea. The news does NOTHING good for me, especially as I’m in a bit of a funk, most likely little to do with the diet and more to do with stress at work and cold and cloudy weather.

At work I had a yogurt and was good most of the morning, then had one of the hamburgers I cooked and 1/2 cucumber.

I grabbed a Dunkin Donuts coffee for lunch as a treat for myself. I looked up the nutrition facts on this – not an easy thing to do. They aren’t even listed on the Dunkin Donuts site. I eventually figured out there was approximately 145 calories in the thing as they use light cream – I’ve been overestimating on this for a while now. Counting calories suck.

Later in the afternoon I had a can of baby clams in the lunchroom. A colleague was walking by, and apparently having pegged me for a ‘health nut’, asked: “What are the health benefits of clams?”

“I like them.” I said.

“Oh.”

On the way home I had a mean case of the hungries. Bad, because I was having food fantasies. Always a bad sign. Sandwiches and McDonald’s danced in my head. The volcano needed to be fed virgins to appease the Gods. It was big.

I mollified myself by through what I considered a negotiated settlement with the hunger volcano. No virgins for you – how about we go down-market? I bought 2 ‘snack-size’ bags of BBQ-flavored pork rinds, with a dusting of everybody’s favorite possible neurotoxin, MSG.

Hoping this would appease the hunger, I crunched these things on the way home, with bits of neon orange toxic BBQ-flavored dust landing on my jacket. It wasn’t a pretty sight, I’m sure. I munched my way through 2 bags, and followed with an Atkins shake as a chaser.

It wasn’t until the Atkins shake that the hunger subsided – perhaps I should have started the appeasement with that?

At home I was exhausted, and took a nap until my wife came come from work and woke me up. Everyone went to the kitchen at this point and I availed myself of an abandoned Wendy’s chicken sandwich that gets a ‘meh’ rating from me on quality. Next up was 1/2 slice of bread with some cheese, a few bites of the once-fashionable-but-now-forgotten key lime pie, and a small glass of milk, then back to bed.

Total grams for the day: 470 (16.6oz). Total calories: 2,710. Fat: 158g, Net carbs: 89g, Protein: 223g (34/19/47%)

Thursday, April 26, 2012 – 203.8

Considering how much I ate yesterday, the scale was kind. As I mentioned the other day, I did mess about with the bullshit BMI number calculation by making myself an inch shorter, and now the BMI reads over 30 – let’s see if I react to that on some unconscious level. We’re complicated beings – I wouldn’t put it past me to be so irrational that it matters.

What was particularly notable about this day was the total lack of hunger during the day: a shake in the am, a yogurt, mid morning, and a cucumber in the afternoon – that’s it. Took a walk, but didn’t lift.

In the evening I got the kids pizza and had some myself – considering I was so low in food for the day – and like pizza – I had 2 slices, then cleaned up the kid’s leftover, putting some butter on the crust.

Mood was so-so and inconsistent. I was more cranky than depressed – which is better. Anger is a much better emotion than despair – anger has energy and, if properly channeled, can be productive. Despair just sits there – waiting. Still overcast and chilly.

Total grams for the day: 241 (8.5oz). Total calories: 1,377. Fat: 241g, Net carbs: 74g, Protein: 100g (31/41/28%)

Friday, April 27, 2012 – 203.4

I was all over the map on this day in terms of mood. In general, I’d say it was OK – but there were ups and downs, believe me. I had my shake and my yogurt – both are convenience foods, and as much as I dislike drinking the chemical concoction that is the shake, it sure is handy and does prevent me from gobbling down much worse…at least sometimes.

I thought I would cut my walk short on this day, but I found myself doing the full three circuits around the building where I work. Sunny though cold and blustery, I see sunshine as medicinal, and whether it’s true or not, it makes me feel better to walk in it. I was appreciably less cranky in the afternoon.

Before leaving work I had a can of oysters, and in the car another shake. I picked up McDonald’s for the kids, which was a bad idea for the kids and a bad idea for myself.

Considering how little I actually ate during the day, I thought a few fries wouldn’t be a big deal. This lead to a few more. Then a few more. I had bought an extra chicken sandwich and ate that as well.

At home, the fast food set off the hunger trigger and I vacuumed up a number of items that certainly weren’t on the acceptable foods list: leftover pasta, some sandwich my wife had leftover from her day at work, some Lindt chocolate balls, some brown rice, and even a little jelly on some bread. The jelly was some sort of Swedish preserves we got on our last day trip to Ikea, the Swedish furniture store. The place is a trip – so clever in so many ways. Very experimental in their notion of something as mundane as selling furniture you have to put together yourself. They even sell food  from Sweden and have a mini grocery store.

The jelly I had – ‘cloudberry’, if I recall, had some strange aftertaste – apparently, living near the Arctic circle make you think any berry tastes good. I think not.

I felt sick after my little overindulgence – and pretty tired as well – and went to bed.

Total grams for the day: 601 (21oz). Total calories: 3,391. Fat: 181g, Net carbs: 240g, Protein: 180g (30/40/30%)

Saturday, April 28, 2012 – 204.0

Very interesting that the food consumed seemed to have little effect on my weight. 0.6 pounds is far less than I would have expected.

Being Saturday I slept in and got up around 6 and drank black coffee. At 11am I had a can of tuna with mayonnaise. In recording this, I noted that this was the first time in nearly a month that I had mayonnaise. I used to eat it all the time. I have been trying to stay with animal fats and olive and coconut oil and avoid the other oils – I suppose I’ve done well here.

I also had an ounce of provolone cheese.

We went to an arts festival in the afternoon and I had street vendor paella. Being the town arts festival, this was no ordinary street vendor but the best restaurant in town making the stuff in a giant pan on the street. No wonder the line was 70 deep. It took a while, but just about the time we were at the front of the line, they brought a giant fresh pan of scallops, sausage, octopus, chicken & rice to the head of the line. The man in front of us said: “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

I had to agree. In the restaurant, you can’t get a piece of bread and butter for $6 – but that was how much the paella cost.

To be honest, however, I was not in the mood for the crowds and the vendors. I would have really preferred a quiet day. I think I’m a bit depressed.

Oddly, I’m not depressed about my lack of weight loss, nor my ‘cheating’, nor anything to do with the diet. Really, I’ve been doing this for so long that I am aware that there are times that are just not right for weight loss for whatever reason. This I accept. I don’t give up – I just fail gracefully and try again. As I’ve mentioned a number of times in this chronicle, I am maintaining my weight loss of some-odd 60 pounds from 9 years ago – and doing so eating carbs – plenty of them.

From a weight maintenance perspective, I’ve got nothing to complain about.

From an exercise perspective, while I have tapered off to only a few days a week of lifting and my walks are down a bit as well, I still have created a craving for activity. I have also proven to myself with the Fitbit that even on days where it appears to me I’m not that active, my life is such that I am still getting on average of 5000 steps in per day and on days where I try to get that number up, I’m over 10,000 per day.

From an eating perspective I do have some bones to pick with myself. I can’t quite bring myself to demonize food anymore. It’s a wonderful way of self-mind control to do this: break foods down into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and eat in such a way that you become a ‘good’ person. I think people sometimes use their diets as a way to feel superior to others – and I don’t even hold it against someone to do so. If they reclaim their health and happiness through this means, I am fine with it – even if they *do* become insufferable, self-righteous assholes in the process.

The problem for me is that I *know* how this magic trick works. And of course, when you know how a magic trick works, the magic disappears.

If there’s a change to be made, more than anything, it would be that I redefine what junk is. I’m OK with not losing weight right now, but if I’m going to splurge of goodies, I’d like them to be higher quality & less processed. Fruit instead of candy and cake, for example. Fresh instead of in a package with a shelf life guaranteed by chemicals to be longer than the lifespan of some family pets.

I don’t believe in total prohibition of any food. What I’m working toward is the eventual loss of desire for what I see as ‘tacky’ food. I would like to banish ‘good’ and ‘bad’ from the thinking about food forever and replace it with ‘lame’ and ‘pathetic’ and ‘pointless’.

Having a gooey and sweet God-knows-what on occasion should never be a crime. What should be a crime is that it wasn’t that good – that you wasted that intake on something that just wasn’t worth it.

Coming back to the notion of ‘depressed’, I do want to make clear that it’s OK, and that I’m OK.

I have an ability that I don’t think everyone else has: I can detach myself from my emotions and look at them as if I was not the one experiencing them. With this ability to observe myself, I can see that, yes, I do have external life issues – things that happen to people – nothing all that unusual – that are weighing on me. A dispassionate assessment of these show that these will pass, and I just need to weather this.

My mood is also sensitive to the actual weather, and the approach of summer and sun will do wonders for my mood.

Really – I’ve had the exact same problems I do now and been in a wonderful mood. It’s not the problems that are the issue – it’s the mood – and moods pass.

To complete the discussion of depression, it pays to make fun of it. The problem with depression is that it can be defined as a disease where one takes themselves way too seriously.

Life’s too serious to take too seriously, frankly.

To conclude this ramble, after the arts festival and grocery shopping, I came home and put away the groceries while my wife whipped up some ‘rapid brioche’ from her French baking cookbook. While filling the cupboards and stuffing the fridge, I ate 3 hot dogs on delicious potato rolls, followed up with a glass of milk. Later, when the brioche was done, I had a piece – hot from the oven. Delish.

Total grams for the day: 467 (16.5oz). Total calories: 2,642. Fat: 147g, Net carbs: 175g, Protein: 145g (31/38/31%)

I’m starting my week where at a weight close to what I gravitate around: 206. I’d like to see if I can be less, um, erratic this week and count better.

Sunday, April 15, 2012 – 205.8

I’ve started crunching the numbers I’ve gathered since April Fool’s Day. Right now I’ve got these great inscrutable charts like this:

It's meaning jumps right out at you, eh?

As reports come in calling me to task on my numbers being wrong, I think I’m going to abandon counting calories.  I’ll continue counting calories along with this as a reference for myself, a translation of sorts, even though it’s a translation to something that isn’t real, it’s such a common way to think about diet that leaving it out at this point would be uncomfortable as well as confusing.

Calories are bogus. They don’t mean what we think they mean. I decided to count grams instead. Unlike calories, grams can’t be faked. You can’t claim something is 30 grams when it really is 20. Anybody with a scale can prove this.

If you sell something that’s 100 calories but it’s really 200, it would be a LOT more complicated to prove. You need a bomb calorimeter to burn the food in a furnace and measure the heat output. Then you have to run a number of calculations on the food to determine how much of the food was bioavailable – a furnace can burn fiber – we can’t. To do this little calculation you have to do a lot of fancy math that ends up looking all scientific and gives you a result to 5 decimal places, but due to the variations in food, you’d be lucky if the number for a given product wasn’t off by +/- 20%, which, if I recall, is how much the US Government allows labels as an error.

Having written the above, I wanted to be sure I wasn’t full of shit so I did a little searching and found this:

Is there a U.S. labeling regulation that establishes the allowable variance for the analyzed value vs. what is printed on the label? If so, what is the specific regulation? (April 2011)

Yes, FDA regulations published at 21CFR101.9(g) specify two classes of nutrients; the allowable variance is different for each. Regardless of the class, the analyzed value is derived from a composite sample of twelve consumer units, with one unit coming from each of twelve different randomly chosen shipper cases.

Class I nutrients are nutrients added to fabricated foods for the purpose of fortification, such as vitamins, minerals, protein and dietary fiber. For this class, the analyzed value must be at least equal to the label value.

Class II nutrients are naturally occurring nutrients. For this class, the analyzed value for the “beneficial nutrients” (vitamin, mineral, protein, total carbohydrate, polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat or potassium) must be at least 80% of the label value and the analyzed value for the “nutrients to limit” (calories, sugars, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol or sodium) must not be greater than 120% of the label value. These allowable variances are commonly referred to as the “80/120 rule.”

So, as I interpret this…if you count your calories scrupulously and try to eat 2000 calories, you might have eaten as much as 2400 – that 400 calories is just shy of a McDonald’s double-Cheeseburger or running 5 miles per hour for 35 minutes –  and it wouldn’t be considered mislabeling.

Calories as we think of them, these magical food energy units, the star of the stage play ‘Calories In-Calories Out’, don’t exist. They are a series of simplifications, error corrections and inaccuracies that get put into You, a biological being with a great range in the ability to absorb 100s of different nutrients known and unknown due to genetics, lifestyle and frigging time of day.

Food Calories are as real as fairies or hobbits – the unicorns of nutrition.

(Please don’t confuse food calories with the real ‘calorie’, which is a unit of heat defined as  the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C. I’m not disputing this is a real, solid fact. I am an idiot, but not that big of an idiot.)

I’m going to count ounces of food I consume – or for my international readers who use a rational system of weights and measures, I’ll count grams.

I think most people have a conception of what an ounce is, or a gram.

If I tell you I ate 12 ounces of nutrients or 340 grams of food on a given day, you’ll have a visceral idea of how much I ate. It’s not perfect, but it feels to me to have a closer relationship to reality than a calorie.

So there.

Breakfast was roast beef and goat cheese. Early afternoon I had 3 fried eggs (kid leftovers). I also had some homemade ice cream – just a few bites. We just bought the machine (the wife wanted one) and I want to see what it tastes like.

Not bad. I might be able to whip up some low carb stuff with this in the future.

About mid afternoon I got the munchies (no illegal drugs involved – sorry) and grabbed some things I would have rather avoided: a small amount of Whole Foods store-made mac & cheese (which is awesome), a piece of greek toast left over from breakfast (put olive oil, oregano and a bit of salt on your toast instead of butter – a great alternative), along with some roast beef and the goat cheese that needs to get eaten before it goes green. I also had a pickled tomato.

Dinner was some mini hamburgers made with grass-fed beef and about 2 fish sticks my wife made from scratch.

I was OK until then. A little later the situation rapidly deteriorated. toast and butter, cake and a single chocolate ball (what restraint!), washed down with a glass of milk. The remainder of the fish sticks also got consumed.

Note that my percentages are very different from before. I’m not counting calories – I’m counting grams.  The percentages used to provide percentage of calories – but calories don’t exist in my new way of thinking.

Total grams for the day: 518 (18.3oz). Fat: 208g, Net carbs: 170g, Protein: 140g (40/32/27%)

Monday, April 16, 2012 – 208.2

If you look at my totals from yesterday, I can tell you that half of the total was eaten right before bed. I had, in fact, calculated my daily numbers before I did a commando raid on the kitchen. Night eating is a big problem of mine – putting the amount of food aside, it simply isn’t good food. It’s food out of my plan – food that does not help me in testing my hypothesis. And eating breakfast doesn’t change this.

Here’s what I would like to do, an attempt to solve this night eating problem: measure it.

Now I’ve been accused of being a little numbers-happy, but it’s a way to pay attention to things that go unnoticed. I remember first learning this trick when first trying to stop smoking cigarettes. Count them. The act of noticing what you are smoking always brought the number of ciggies down by 25-33% for me.

A comment on my last post from Lee struck home: in all your experimenting, have you tried a low carb diet like the one Atkins wrote about and you went on originally and stay on it for 2 weeks? She didn’t say it like that of course, people who comment on my blog are very nice, like anyone talking to a scary crazy person would, but that’s what I heard.

Jeez – I don’t know if I can do that…that’s why I spend all this effort doing everything but. I’ll try, though – actually, it’s what I have been trying to do all along, but I suck at low carb.

As to eats, a light day. I wasn’t all that hungry. And I tracked the times I ate At 1pm I had a greek yogurt. I readjusted the carbs down from 8 to 4. You can do that with Greek yogurt as the label must say 8 because that’s what the milk the yogurt started from had, but the yogurtizing of the milk creates lactic acid from some of the sugars so only half the sugar is left. At 3pm, a tin of baby clams. At 5pm, 3 oz. of roast beef with some goat cheese, at 7pm an Atkins shake, and 9pm, 2 hot dogs and 2 mini burger patties.

I did exercise though still sore even though I skipped yesterday, and my overall mood was pretty good for a Monday. My mind was popping with interesting ideas all morning – work drained that pond by the afternoon, but I was productive and upbeat. I also walked at lunch, though it was an oppressive dry and hot desert day – I don’t live in a desert, however, and I cut the walking short.

Lee also mentioned I should mix up my exercise.

I know.

I’m stalling.

Total grams for the day: 184 (6.5oz). Total calories: 1,113. Fat: 65g, Net carbs: 9g, Protein: 110g (35/5/60%)

Tuesday, April 17, 2012 – 205.4

Woke up and decided I would be consistent. How do you do that?

I figured by bringing the same stuff to work I did the previous day. I did think it might behoove me to eat something green, like a plant, maybe, so I grabbed some middle-aged zucchini from the veggie drawer along with the usual yogurt, 3 oz of roast beef, and 2 oz/2 tablespoons/28 grams of butter. Why does their need to be 3 different frigging measurements for the same thing – 2 based on weight and one volumetric?!? Humanity certainly succeeds in making things unnecessarily complicated and driving themselves crazy.

I think the total amount of food yesterday was a bit low. I actually ate in the evening feeling a bit light-headed. I need to aim higher today – but not overshoot my goal, like I am wont to do.

Total grams for the day: 238.5 (8.4oz). Total calories: 1,512. Fat: 101g, Net carbs: 14.5g, Protein: 123g (42/6/52%)

Wednesday, April 18, 2012 – 203.0

More of the same from yesterday, though ‘more’ in general.  Hungry in the AM – no doubt my body wanting more nutrients after 2 low days, I had an Atkins shake going out the door at 7am. A Fage yogurt followed mid morning, and hungry early afternoon I had the roast beef and, butter and a large cucumber with salt before my walk, which was cut short by rain. I felt weird, a kind of indescribable weird that I’m familiar with: going into ketogenesis. It doesn’t impact my mood nor my thought processes insofar as I can see – I was sharp and my mood was OK.

Late afternoon was a can of tuna.

Although sore, I stopped at the gym on the way home and did my weight routine. At home I had 2 burgers with reduced sugar ketchup, and 2 Babybel cheeses wrapped in prosciutto.

I was still hungry, which to me was more a cellular hunger than an emotional response or a carb-triggered hunger – my body wanted more because it needed more. I satisfied it with an Atkins shake, which did the trick.

Total grams for the day: 323.8 (6.5oz). Total calories: 1,937. Fat: 124g, Net carbs: 19g, Protein: 180g (38/6/55%)

Thursday, April 19, 2012 – 202.8

Only trace ketones in the AM, and if you look at my numbers, you see a possible reason – not enough fat. Thinking I need more fat, I decided to up the fat intake with our old friend: butter. I had butter in my coffee when I got up – I hadn’t done this in a while. You know what – I like it, really, really like it. Hungry in the AM I did have a shake (though I was trying to cut back on these). Early afternoon I began my afternoon grazing: yogurt, a cucumber, roast beef with butter, and more coffee with butter.

I skipped exercise because it seemed that every single person decided to converge on the place and there were people standing outside. I like it a little quieter than that.

Yesterday was that weird getting-into-ketosis feeling, on this day that had passed. And in the evening, the butter did what I expected – turned the keto stick a dark red.

Later in the evening the wife came home with this wonderful imported Belgian butter. I didn’t mean to eat 1/2 pound of the stuff – which by itself contained 144 grams of ‘evil’ fat – but it goes remarkably good on pork rinds. At least I didn’t touch the beautiful baguettes she brought home. A good butter on pork rinds is pretty darn good if you ask me.

Total grams for the day: 364 (12.8oz). Total calories: 2,917. Fat: 277g, Net carbs: 17g, Protein: 70g (76/4/19%)

Friday, April 20, 2012 – 203.2

There should have been no doubt that I would be in ketosis in the morning – and I was.

Another observation that comes to light when you cont total grams eaten rather than fantasy calories: you can’t gain more weight than the total weight of the nutrients you ate.

When I give you my total grams for the day, it measures the food without the water content – right? So yesterday I had 12.8 ounces, or a little over 3/4 of a pound of nutrients – food minus water. I ate 12 ounces and gained about 7.

I had run out of lunch and I had a big project that had to be done, so I brought a little extra in the way of food with me in case I had to stay late. There was bacon in the fridge and I weighed out 4 ounces. Four ounces of bacon is a LOT, really.

Didn’t pack anything green – I ran out of the cucumbers.

In work I was munching on my bag of bacon around noon when a coworker came in.

“What are you eating?”

“Bacon.”

He looked at the size of the bag and made that face: “You really like your bacon.”

“Joe, I ate a half pound of butter last night. Let me be that person in your life that you can say: ‘I might be screwed up, but he’s screwed up way more than me.”

“I don’t think you’re screwed up – I think you’re an enigma.”

This is typical of my conversations with other people on my diet. It’s why I tend not to talk about it anymore, and probably why I maintain this blog: people who eat a low carb diet not only don’t eat what the average person eats, we eat the stuff they’ve been taught should be treated like nuclear waste.

Go ahead – tell someone you ate a half-pound of butter. On your diet. And you’re losing weight. Watch their face. The confusion spreads across it. The brows furrow as, for them, you’ve just proved 2+2=3.

Am I about to have a sudden heart attack because I eat this way? I don’t know. I do know that my last blood work was OK, and that I have been eating like this for a long time. I also know I’m in better shape and feel better than when I started this diet in 2003 – and I know that one of the first symptoms of a heart condition is sudden death.

I suppose it comes down to personal responsibility again: whether we decide to go against the flow, decide to go with the crowd, or make no decision at all, we actually are making decisions. If I were to drop dead, my doctor would feel good that he knows the reason why. If I ate junk like most people, he would be confident that contributed.

If I ate ‘healthy’ as he defined it? It would be a tad bit harder, but unlike my death from eating ‘artery clogging fat’, the death of the low-fat-veggie-eating ‘good patient’ would be the enigma.

Ultimately, it’s my responsibility alone. I tried low carb and chose to stick with it. I’m that experiment of one.

Digression aside and back to eats, 4 ounces of bacon is quite filling, and it powered me through my walk and kept me going through the afternoon. Late in the day I had 2 organic hot dogs and as I was particularly parched after the salty bacon and the walk, I splurged and had a diet Coke.  I also had a can of smoked oysters.

I exercised on the way home, then came back and had another shake and, as the family was out, read a bit. When they came home I had a dozen olives, 1 leftover hamburger with some reduced sugar ketchup and a few strawberries.

Total grams for the day: 269 (9.5oz). Total calories: 1,735. Fat: 118g, Net carbs: 22g, Protein: 129g (43/8/48%)

Saturday, April 21, 2012 – 203.0

Back at that place. The low-end of my range. I have been keeping carbs under 25 grams since Monday. In ketosis since at least Thursday. I’m 5 days in.

And I was about to ruin it.

Out early for a dentist appointment, I stopped at the local supermarket for a few necessities I can’t get at the other 2 stores I frequent. I was shopping hungry (always a bad idea) and passing the deli, I decided to get my favorite bad deli meat – the Shop Rite ‘wide’ bologna. This I mentioned before. I had written Shoprite for the nutrition info and they never responded. I asked the miserable deli guy if I could see the label and instead he read it off to me – as if I’d remember. This time I had a more helpful deli girl hold it up for me to take a pic of the label, so now I had the goods.

Short of it is 5 grams of carbs per 2 ounces. High, but not so high as to ruin anything if I was careful.

I ruined it.

I picked on it on the way home, then weighed the package. Jeez – is my scale broke?!? I ate 10 ounces?

Well, that’s 25 grams of carbs – I’m still OK, I thought.

But I ruined it some more.

Unfortunately, this most wondrous specimen of cheap deli meat set off my appetite for most of the afternoon. What ingredient does this? I dunno, but my consumption continued: coffee with cream, bacon, hot dogs, some American cheese, some Greek dip, some supermarket roast chicken breast. Mostly low carb. Not too bad – at least in the carb department.

But then I ruined it even more.

My wife and I made an impromptu dinner date / play date with some friends. I figured that there would be food, and I would eat and enjoy myself, but sometimes in the balance between dieting and the pleasure of food leans toward the latter perhaps a bit more than a fellow on a mission to lose a few pounds would like.

It was also made more difficult because – stupid me – had ALREADY eaten more than a day’s share of food before we even left for the dinner date. Great planning, me.

While I abstained from alcohol and most of the chips and other complete and utter crap, I did indulge in the homemade lasagna, the mango cheesecake, and some tiramisu.

We came home late, and the appetite set off by the carbs I had earlier – maybe even that bologna this morning – I consciously and deliberately took the approach: WTF – I’ll eat what I want and assess the damage tomorrow. This led to some small baked potatoes with butter left over from the afternoon and the remainder of the bologna on a fresh potato roll.

While a failure for the scale, it was a great day, really. I had fun, I laughed, I ate well. That counts for something…though in a post about trying to lose weight it might seem out-of-place.

I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that this sort of thing – a pleasurable, guilt-free overindulgence in food – is precisely what IS needed in a blog about losing weight. It’s needed occasonally to avoid us becoming joyless, of hating food, of hating the beautiful sensual experience that food is, and us becoming thin and grim and living a life that will, in its ultimate ending that none of us can avoid,  only leave us good-looking corpses, who, when living, gave up many of life’s pleasures to look good in the coffin.

A poet named Thomas Jordan, who died in 1685, wrote a poem that, in reflection, I have stolen from in that last paragraph. While I’m not a poetry buff, this poem is worth reading in its entirety. For those not so inclined, here’s the last stanza from that poem. (For those of us who don’t know latin, the phrase ‘nulla voluptas’ is translated as meaning ‘no delight/enjoyment/pleasure’):

Then why should we turmoil in cares and in fears,
Turn all our tranquill’ty to sighs and to tears?
Let ‘s eat, drink, and play till the worms do corrupt us,
‘Tis certain, Post mortem
Nulla voluptas.
For health, wealth and beauty, wit, learning and sense,
Must all come to nothing a hundred years hence.

Total grams for the day: 750 (26.5oz). Total calories: 5,018. Fat: 377g, Net carbs: 180g, Protein: 193g (50/25/25%)

I am actually impressed with its accuracy. I’ve counted my steps a few times and compared it to the device and it is very, very close. It also seems to count going up stairs, but NOT going up escalators - clever. The weight numbers here might be a bit misleading because I haven’t been entering them in here with any regularity. I also question the accuracy of the sleep stats, as it’s easy to mess up – you’re supposed to essentially tell the thing you are falling asleep, but, like most people, this sometimes sneaks up on you if you’re reading in bed. I also have forgotten to put it on completely.

Anywho, these nits aside, I do like this gadget. I can carp a bit about the website and the app, but that can wait…

Johns Hopkins researchers have made the proponents of the always controversial Atkins diet very happy.

A recent study presented at the American Heart Association’s March meeting lauded low-carb diets such as Atkins for producing weight loss and belly fat loss — linked to heart disease — more efficiently than low-fat diets.

It goes on:

And in case this point was lost to those critics of Atkins, a press release from Johns Hopkins said, “These results show that weight loss, along with exercise, is important for improving vascular health, and suggest that following a low-carb diet rather than the conventionally recommended low-fat diet for weight loss is not a concern in terms of vascular health.”

If I were a shareholder in Atkins Nutritionals, which I’m not, I might be tempted to say, “so there” to all those naysayers.

But I’ll let Atkins staff do that.

“The findings from the Johns Hopkins study demonstrate what we already know to be true: Atkins has many scientifically validated health benefits, including improvements in cardiovascular health markers,” said Colette Heimowitz, vice president of nutrition and education for Atkins Nutritionals Inc., in a press release Atkins quickly put out.

I, of course, believe this. But I also like my facts to be untainted by bias, and like my journalism to be untainted by it. It appears not to be the case, however:

A few years back, I met Veronica Atkins Mersentes, widow of diet originator Robert Atkins. She had an apartment on Flagler Drive, next door to the Palm Beach Yacht Club, and presented me with a copy of her cookbook, Atkins for Life.

Now, having Veronica Atkins give you a book doesn’t mean you have been bribed, but paranoid me wanted to see if I could source this article elsewhere. A Google search yielded a lot of results, but they all led back to this single article. A lot of them on low carb sites, a lot of them self-congratulatory.

Jimmy Moore cites it. I found it other places, but, curiously, not on the actual John Hopkins website. There’s a lot there on ketogenic diets and epilepsy, but nothing about this study.

I checked the Atkins site to be sure it was a real press release from them. Yep, it was. You only do a press release when it favors your position, though lying in one would be the height of stupidity.

I searched on the name of the doctor who presented the paper and finally found it:

LOSING BELLY FAT, WHETHER FROM A LOW-CARB OR A LOW-FAT DIET, HELPS IMPROVE BLOOD VESSEL FUNCTION

Release Date: 03/13/2012

Overweight people who shed pounds, especially belly fat, can improve the function of their blood vessels no matter whether they are on a low-carb or a low-fat diet, according to a study being presented by Johns Hopkins researchers at an American Heart Association scientific meeting in San Diego on March 13 that is focused on cardiovascular disease prevention.

In the six-month weight-loss study, Hopkins researchers found that the more belly fat the participants lost, the better their arteries were able to expand when needed, allowing more blood to flow more freely. The researchers also found that participants in the study who were on a low-carb diet lost about ten pounds more, on average, than those who were on a low-fat diet. Being overweight increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, especially if the fat is accumulated in the belly above the waist.

“After six months, those who were on the low-carb diet lost an average of 28.9 pounds versus 18.7 pounds among those on the low-fat diet,” says lead investigator Kerry J. Stewart, Ed.D., a professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of clinical and research exercise physiology at the Johns Hopkins Heart and Vascular Institute.

It continues – and is worth the read. Nice to find the original story so I can judge it on its own worth rather than have it filtered for me. I wish the author had included a link.

I’m at a bit of an impasse at this point, I haven’t appreciably lost weight, nor gained, really. I have been faithful to the diet, unfaithful, high calorie, low-calorie, good mood and bad – and I still remain between 200 and 210.

It’s a little amazing, actually.

As it doesn’t seem much of anything impact the weight range I’ve settled into, I’m at a loss as to what to try next.

Reflecting on this actually reveals that none of these posts have been about low carb: they’ve really been about a guy who never, never, ever wanted to exercise actually begin to exercise. Admittedly not all that much compared to some others, but with afternoon walks and my 10 minutes in the gym on most days, I’m averaging an hour per week weight training and that Fitbit gadget I bought just sent me an email to tell me I’ve walked 50 miles since April 1.

Here at week 8, I still suck at low carb, but I suck a whole lot less at exercise than I did before I started. Putting exercise aside for the present, let’s go back to the diet – and what it means to ‘diet’.

Why am I doing this again?

When I started writing this post, I thought I’d like to get even more nerdy, more science-y and more count-y. For the coming week I though I’d like to get back to my low carb habit of past weeks, and get a bit more organized as to my numbers, and what they mean by looking at the trends. The kind of questions I have are:

• Is there a correlation between the fat/carb/protein percentages and weight?
• Does the above correlation differ with caloric intake?
• If I begin to chart mood, does it correlate with either?
• Does cheating correlate with any of the captured variables?
• Does hunger correlate with any of the captured variables?

Sunday, April 8, 2012 – 210.0

For Easter I had ham, chicken, brussels sprouts and shallots, zucchini and onions with goat cheese, and some Lindt chocolate balls in the evening. There wasn’t much in the way of measuring – except for the chocolate balls – they’re easy to measure – so other than them, the rest of the days numbers are a rough estimate.

Total calories for the day: 3,571. Fat: 777g, Net carbs: 84g, Protein: 148g (88/5/7%)

Monday, April 9, 2012 – 208.2

Leftovers for lunch. I skipped the cream or butter in the coffee in the AM, and didn’t have anything until noon. Lunch was brussels sprouts and ham. Hungry on the way home – but not too much. Stopped to exercise – it felt tough today, though I did it. Also noticeably tired on the way home. I made myself am omlette with the insides of the colored eggs – we blew them out this year so the kids could keep their creations. Ham and goat cheese went in the omelette. Also had 4 chocolate balls and went to bed.

Total calories for the day: 1989.  Fat: 293g, Net carbs: 50g, Protein: 105g (80/7/13%)

Tuesday, April 10, 2012 – 207.4

I wasn’t accurately tracking this day though I can report that it was pretty much like the previous day, but with some bread. I took the days numbers from a rough estimate as well as taking yesterday’s dinner.

Total calories for the day: 2,147.  Fat: 300g, Net carbs: 50, Protein: 133g (78/6/15%)

Wednesday, April 11, 2012 – 207.4

I walked as usual, and on this day my Fitbit sent me an email to announce that I’ve walked 50 miles since April 1. I like my Fitbit.

As to eating, I had cream in my coffee in the AM, roast beef and butter at work, a yogurt and a shake. Evening was a fantastic dinner out with my wife at a tiny basement restaurant nearby that serves, with little fanfare, the absolute best sushi and sashimi I have ever had. We’ve eaten there once before – we should have gone back earlier. At home, I gorged on potato chips (made with olive oil so they’re healthy :-/) and Lindt chocolate balls. Good news about the chocolate balls: as there’s hardly any left, it will be hard for me to continue eating them.

Total calories for the day: Not Available

Thursday, April 12, 2012 – 208.8

I took the day off to spend with my family. I exercised early, and had coffee with cream in the early AM. I was hungry and had an Atkins shake, then 5 strips of bacon and a few bites of scrambled eggs. While the previous day’s carbs didn’t have that much of an impact on weight, they do mess up my hunger. We took a long car ride to a distant mall, and my hunger subsided.

For lunch, we ate at Legal Seafood. There aren’t many of these restaurants, and they are expensive, but their food is second to none. It is also very easy to get a great low carb meal there – just skip the starches that come with the entrees and avoid the bread they bring to the table, and you’re good.

I had cajun-spiced wood-grilled haddock, with sides of spinach and brocoli. I also had steamed mussels. Great, right? Well, I did have a bit of bread as well as some calamari – the calamari came as a trio – a Thai version with a sweet curry sauce and pineapples, a Rhode Island version with hot peppers, and the classic with a simple but robust marinara sauce. I hd some of all, but not too much as it was shared by the table. I also grabbed maybe 4 french fries from the kid, and had some seared scallops. This was about mid-afternoon, and when we were done, we went back into the mall for more browsing as it is huge.

We didn’t leave until 7:30pm, and unfortunately, a leftover bagel from the kid was in the car next to me. I ate it on the trip. It was a birthday and we picked up a cake on the way home – a strawberry cake with whipped cream and fresh strawberries – actually it was mostly whipped cream and fresh strawberries. I had a nice slice, then went to bed. I (of course) had my Fitbit on and it registered that I only did 80% of the steps I normally do on a weekday.

Total calories for the day: Not available

Friday, April 13, 2012 – 210.0

Numb and sore. That’s how I would describe how I felt when I woke up. My arm was somewhat numb as if I slept on it wrong, and my muscles ache more than I would expect from the same weight I’ve been working out with for a while now.

I think there might be some correlation with the high carb intake. My mood as of yesterday was so-so – I was distracted by the day and I think that helped my mood, but there were times when my thoughts took a dark turn. Chemical or situational? I could jump on a connection between the upped intake of carbs and mood, but I also have a lot of stress in work and it’s April 13th and I haven’t done my taxes yet.

I also woke up feeling fat. Barring the inaccuracies of calorie counting (more on that in a moment), it appears that little has changed in terms of calories over the last few weeks, and my activity has probably increased. The only thing that has changed is the amount of carbs in proportion to fat and protein. Once again I prove to myself that it’s only carbs that make me fatter.

Oh, well, back to the low carb to take this weight off. While I have little confidence that I can predict I’ll be under 200 by any date, I can assure you that in 5 days – if I abstain from carbs – I’ll be back down below 205.

Another thing that is bugging me: I haven’t entered my calories for the past 2 days. As awful a measurement they are, I believe they have some value – and it’s screwing up my reporting, so I went back and added them – and noticed on some days my fat intake was upwards of 700 grams. How can this be?

A little research showed that the Loseit! app was counting 3 of their chocolate balls as having 165 grams of fat. That’s 5 ounces all by itself. From the Lindt site, 3 balls weigh in total 36 grams – 1-1/4 ounce.

So the LoseIt! app shows the fat content alone weighs almost 4 ounces more than the total weight of the items!

Again – the Losit! app lies – and it lied big-time.

I think this is because the people who make the app have their users enter the food numbers in their database, and a number of their users are simply idiots – and the developers of the app, being lazy like the vast amount of us are, don’t check these numbers.

They could write their program so that it flagged something as idiotic as 1.25 ounces of chocolate containing 5 ounces of fat, but they don’t.

Calorie counting sucks. And now I went back and did my best to adjust some calories from this past week – and I am going to be very, very suspect of what the LoseIt! app tells me about nutrition information.

As Easter candy has disappeared, and birthday festivities are over, eating became a bit more routine – but what routine to choose? I had a low carb, high calorie approach I could try of 2500-3000 calories, or the low-calorie, low carb where I try to keep it under 1,600-1,700.

The only difference I noticed between the two was that I was hungrier on the lower calorie approach (duh) and tended to cheat more.

As I wasn’t all that hungry in the am, and that 210 number on the scale does NOT make me feel good about things, I went the low-calorie route, having two yogurts during the day as well as a can of tuna. As I was extraordinarily busy, the day went by fast and I was certainly not starving myself – I just wasn’t hungry.

I’ve come to look forward to my midday walk – I’m still somewhat amazed at my craving for exercise now, and expect it to evaporate at any moment. It’s just not me.

My deep and long-standing hatred of all things athletic and kinetic – wasted.

I find myself walking for a few reasons: it’s a way to break up my day and get away from my desk and away from the relentless stream of seemingly unsolvable puzzles that I need to solve. I am a big adherent of analyzing a problem – then forgetting about it for a time. My best thinking is done by my unconscious (the conscious me is a dope). I take my walk, get back to my desk, and it’s as if while listening to an audiobook or music, my unconscious mind chugged through the problem – or a dozen – and the answer are there waiting for me. They’re not always the right answers, mind you, but at least the flow of ideas begins – and bad ideas frequently begat better ones. Hell is no ideas.

I also find it somewhat medicinal. Or at least I frame it like that to myself. I think framing – a fancy psychobabble term for how you look a things – is important to any sort of personal improvement. I use it a lot. It can appear delusional, but I believe, as we’re all delusional, it’s best to pick delusions that make you happy.

Lastly, I’ve gotten in the habit of wanting that Fitbit to register over 10,000 steps a day. The walk does it.

One last thing about the walk: I notice my back was not hurting as usual. It’s hard to notice non-events, and this might have occurred earlier. If this is the case, it’s a nice, additional side-benefit of the exercise.

Weight loss has NOT been a side benefit, nor do I hold my hopes out for that – there’s simply too much evidence that the amount and type of exercise I’m doing won’t do much for the numbers on the scale – and if I thought they would, I would have given up on it a month ago in frustration and disappointment. I’m doing it for overall health.

While skeptical on a lot of things and contrarian on others, I have no doubt that moderate exercise has health benefits.

I skipped the weights this day because of soreness. I am trying to do it daily to ingrain a habit though I know you should give muscle groups a rest. I need to incorporate other exercises in my weight routine – I just haven’t gotten around to it. I’m still lazy – even while I exercise, I am doing it in the laziest possible way.

Evening eats were light. There were scrambled eggs and bacon in the fridge and I had that. One thing this multi-week experiment has been lacking is cooking and meal plans – perhaps that’s part of the problem. Perhaps it’s that I have always eaten erratically, and family schedules usually prevent sit-down meals at the same time for everybody.

Having Daddy on low carb, Mommy on the Ultramind Diet and the kids on the standard ‘Picky Kid’ diet make it harder still.

On an aside, not familiar with the ‘Picky Kid Diet’? The rules are simple:

1. Adhere to a strict diet of only pizza, french fries, soda and pasta
2. Refuse any other foods, especially ones cooked from scratch, using fresh ingredients
3. Especially avoid anything green
4. Whine about being hungry and there being ‘nothing to eat’  in the presence of abundant healthy food until items in #1 are given to you

Total calories for the day: 1,641.  Fat: 65g, Net carbs: 22g, Protein: 114g (51/8/40%)

Saturday, April 14, 2012 – 206.4

See? See?!? I peel off 4 pounds in one day, after gorging myself for a good part of the week on extra calories and carbs – and end up at a weight that isn’t appreciably different than if I hadn’t eaten all that junk, at least as the chronicle of the past week tells it.

Now, if I wasn’t so damn erratic, and I kept to this eating, would it continue to drop off?

This also seems to show what a lie it is that you can’t lose weight, keep it off, and never, ever eat junk because you’ll gain it back. I have been this weight, more or less, since September. I took off 30 pounds. I have kept that weight off eating 10 Lindt chocolate balls in a row. A Dunkin Donuts bagel. A huge slice of gooey, sugar-infused strawberry cake. An immoderate amount of Sicilian pizza with toppings. Macaroni and cheese – and a lot more.

The past 8 weeks are more or less how I’ve been eating for more than 6 months. I’m just paying more attention now.

While I don’t have my cholesterol numbers for this time, I had a very comprehensive set of blood work done and aside from the mild pre-diabetes I was diagnosed with years ago, everything’s fine – and my experiment in pricking my finger 100 times in at all hours over a period of the past few weeks showed my blood glucose tends to stay in a small range and almost never goes over 140 – the point where the real damage from diabetes can begin.

In short – this is not where I want to be right now – but it could be a heckuva lot worse.

Last year I was drinking, had started smoking cigarettes again, not exercising, 30-pounds heavier – AND sucking on nicotine lozenges.

While at this moment I might be frustrated with my scale, the real and noticeable improvements to my health can’t go unnoticed.

I’ve made big progress – and, amazingly, reset my internal weight set point – somehow – and my body does not want to seem to budge from here. I just have to convince it to move to a lower setpoint…somehow.

It is perhaps coincidence that I am reading ‘The Obesity Myth’, an awesome book with a contrarian perspective on weight that I hope to discuss at length here, and the author goes into a particularly interesting experiment on overfeeding.

The subjects were overfed by 1,000 calories per day some of the subjects reacted by trying to get rid of the extra calories through energy expenditure. (I don’t know why excreting calories isn’t mentioned. We discuss ‘not properly absorbing nutrients’ all the time in medical science. Nutrients have calories. If we don’t absorb them, where do they go?)

Anyway, this passage struck me as interesting – maybe more than interesting:

The most striking finding that came out of this study was the radically different amounts of energy expended by the study’s subjects through what is known as “activity thermogenesis”, especially non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). Neat is largely determined by activities of daily living, such as fidgeting, maintaining posture, spontaneous muscle contraction, and the like – things most people do not keep track of, and often are not even aware of. The change in NEAT brought on by overfeeding the sixteen subjects ranged from nothing to 692 calories per day. 692 calories is what an average runner will expend in the course of a 10 kilometer (6.2 mile) race.

I wonder: is this how I maintain? Have I become a fidget-bucket and don’t know it?

Leaving this unanswered question for some other time, Let’s check out the eats.

Avoiding breakfast again. It didn’t seem to change things appreciably, so I am going with my natural inclinations again – let’s see where it leads me. I broke my fast late morning with a stir-fry of odds and ends – the last of the ham, onion, peppers, and I have a slight suspicion there might have been some cornstarch in it I wasn’t told about.

I ate 10 Lindt chocolate balls the other day – I’ll take a little cornstarch in stride

I had a lunch a little after: some Bela sardines in a cayenne pepper infused olive oil. These sardines were so-so – I added some salsa to them, which upped the flavor a bit. I also had cream in my coffee.

The afternoon was spent at the park with the kids, and coming home late afternoon I was hungry. The wife was out, one kid was asleep and the other in her room, and I ended up nibbling on what was about. I grabbed an Atkins shake, had some pork rinds (which ended up being the entire bag, the whites from an egg – a leftover the kids left behind, a few forkfuls of some Trader Joe’s Linguine in clam sauce, a bit of a bagel with cream cheese (maybe a quarter), with 2 pats of butter.

The wife came home and we went grocery shopping – our version of a hot date for a Saturday night. All the walking around the store got my Fitbit to count over 10,000 steps for the day, which is becoming frequent.

Back home later in the evening, still hungry, I had a baked yam. A simple baked yam, all by itself, is a dessert for me. I hated them as a kid, and as an adult. As someone on a low carb diet, they can be sweet awesomeness – and a heckuva lot better for you than most other desserts.

If you’re gonna – try a yam.

Total calories for the day: 1,932.  Fat: 120, Net carbs: 58, Protein: 137g (57/14/29%)

There been a psychological hurdle that has been bothering me, and it is the constant reminder in the LoseIt! app of all the crap I’ve eaten. Once you’ve added a food, there’s no way to differentiate the ‘good foods’ (however you define this) from ‘bad foods’.

So I deleted everything from my Fitbit and my LoseIt! app and am going to start again from scratch.

This might seem like extra work, and it is, but it’s also a mental clearing for me – a means of refocusing, a means of establishing new habits. And one habit I’ve gotten into is the habit of not losing weight, eating crap, and not caring because I’m maintaining.

Weight maintenance is great, but it’s not the point. The experiment has taken a different direction and yielded the interesting info that sometimes in maintenance, calories don’t matter all that much.

Great info. Well worth the exercise. Serendipitous – but not the point.

I took a detour, it was fun and now it’s done.

There’s also the notion – perhaps an impossible one – and that is the health aspect. I have been eating a lot of foods I don’t consider healthy. Unhealthy weight loss is far worse than being 20 pounds heavier than I like.

There is NO correlation between weight and health when not morbidly obese. You are way better off eating healthy and exercising – and staying fat – than you are starving yourself, or using some drug or other unhealthy means to get down to a lower weight.

Losing weight and maintaining health are goals that much occur in tandem.

I think what I would like to do this week is focus on food monotony. I find the notion that things like breath mints can stall a diet. Really – can a chemical in a breath mint stop weight loss? If that’s the case, shouldn’t we be handing them out to starving people to help them retain as much weight as possible?

This is another thing that doesn’t quite add up for me – but I’m thinking that there might be a mechanism akin to an allergic reaction that makes certain innocuous foods obesigenic – and it appears to be different for everyone.

I hope for me it isn’t dairy – I like cheese and yogurt too much.

So despite my wife’s desire for me to join her on her diary free diet excursion, I am going to continue dairy, though try to stay within the following short list of foods – as well as my explanation as to why they are on the list:

1. Wellshire Farms Roast Beef. Antibiotic and hormone-free roast beef with the only ingredients salt and pepper. As convenience food from the deli, it is the best quality, minimally processed stuff I can find.
2. Organic ground beef.
3. Canned sardines. Wild Planet sardines come in BPA-free cans, but hey – the FDA said there’s no reason to worry about BPA, so no worries, right?
4. Fage Yogurt
5. Organic or Imported butter from grass-fed cows
6. Tuna. The Wild Planet Skipjack Tuna is lower in mercury than albacore tuna, comes in a BPA-free can, and is cooked in its own juices, meaning that the omega-3 that was in the fish wasn’t cooked away – like most brands are.
7. Romaine Lettuce
8. Organic eggs
9. Whole Foods Canola oil Mayonnaise – While relatively low in omega-6, I will try to keep this to a minimum
10. Applegate Farms Hot Dogs – Uncured. Organic. From grass-fed cows. About the best hot dogs to buy if you’ve got to buy hot dogs
11. Organic Zucchini – Low in carbs, I munch them raw
12. Organic Celery
13. Organic Psyllium husks – keeps things going, if you catch my drift. I try to eat this in between meals as psyllium is a so-called ‘anti-nutrient’ and can bind to minerals in food, blocking absorption.

Things I will avoid

1. Mints
2. Splenda
3. Atkins Shakes
4. Wheat in particular (a nod to my wife there)
5. Bread in general
6. Pork rinds

Sunday, April 1, 2012 – 207.2

Now, what I wanted to happen wasn’t what actually happened. Starting fresh and clean for a new month didn’t pan out, and while my caloric intake was about 1000 calories less than some of the days from last week, it was high in carbs. It wasn’t bad stuff – quinoa, gluten-free home-made apple pie with only a small amount of sugar, an orange – but it’s bad stuff if you’re on a low carb diet, certainly.

The calorie count might be a bit low, but it’s in the ballpark.

Decided to up the weights on the 3 machines I work out on 5 pounds, from 70 to 75. Big deal, right? I thought to myself: if it’s only 5 pounds per month, it would end up being 130 pounds in a year – a nonsense calculation as it predicts some linear growth that I don’t think is possible given my age.

Total calories for the day: 2,633. Fat: 166g, Net carbs: 175g, Protein: 69g (58/31/11%)

Monday, April 2, 2012 – 208.2

There you go – 1000 calories less and I gain a pound, though admittedly, it’s probably water weight. This is a better day to start – work days allow less access to the fridge. The goal this week is to keep the calories lower but maintain the proportion between 60 and 80% fat, eat more green veggies and salads – and see what happens.

So I started the day with cream, but half the amount – 2 tablespoons instead of 4.

Two thing notable this day was a total lack of hunger until the afternoon, and a very good mood – an almost manic good mood. It was a Monday, it was cold, and I did not win the 600 million Mega Millions Jackpot – what was I in such a good mood for?

I have little doubt that my moods are a chemical affair and if I could divine whatever chemical resultant of some complex chemical process that brings them, I’d be rich. But they are a random affair. I could attribute them to…oranges! I had an orange yesterday! Oranges make you happy! Buy the domain ‘Orangesmakeyouhappy.com’. Confuse correlation with causation, write about it, and have a million sad people scarf down oranges thinking it will make them happy, too.

Some months ago a notion came to mind and I wrote it on a sticky note and stuck it on my noteboard:

Too many variables make even the correct answer unprovable

I suppose I’m a stong believer in thinking there are some things we can never understand. I think nutrition might be one of them, at least in the sense that anyone could put together a set of simple rules that people follow to lose weight or improve mood. We are self-contained oceans – entire ecosystems in shirts and slacks and comfortable shoes. I think it’s a bit presumptuous to think we can unravel the knot without deceiving ourselves that things are what they appear.

That digression aside, let’s move on to another digression of sorts: all the darn things I am tracking. Here’s a list:

1. Weight in the morning, courtesy Tanita scale
2. Blood glucose levels randomly throughout the day, courtesy of TrueTrak
3. Flights of stairs climbed, care of Fitbit
4. Number of steps taken, courtesy of Fitbit
5. Bullshit number of calories burned throughout the day, as calculated by my basal metabolic rate + estimated calories burned by the flights of stairs climbed and number of steps taken, courtesy of Fitbit
6. Food intake, courtesy of LoseIt
7. Quality of sleep, courtesy of Fitbit

That’s a lot, admittedly, and not the way I want to – or intend to – live the rest of my life. It *is* interesting in a nerd way as an experiment for a few weeks, and if it helps me break the stall, and/or establish healthier habits, then it was worth it.

I’m digging the Fitbit, actually. I found myself walking at lunch just to get that number up on the little display. Strange motivation, but, whatever.

Eats for the rest of the day was much like the previous 2 weeks, but I brought the total calories down. I’m wondering: if my body can adapt to 3,000 plus calories and not gain weight, what happens if I suddenly half that caloric intake? Anything? What would the sudden deficit do?

I had cream in my coffee when I woke up but half of what I was consuming in previous weeks. I already mentioned a lack of hunger and only had a greek yogurt early afternoon. I munched on a raw zucchini as the afternoon progressed and had  5 tablespoons of butter with 3-1/2 ounces of roast beef.

In the evening I had a salad with tomatoes and some caesar dressing, 2 hot dogs, mustard, romaine lettuce, a dill pickle and a few sips of the kid’s homemade smoothie.

Now that the Fitbit is integrated with the LoseIt! app, it tells me I earned the right to eat 484 more calories. I don’t buy it. There’s no direct correlation like that. I ignore it.

Exercise seemed tough today. The extra 5 pounds felt like 50 for some reason. My wife unexpectedly met me at the gym, and came in to watch me. I think partly because she didn’t believe that I would actually be exercising with such dedication and that their must be some other reason – perhaps she imagined the place overrun with bikini-clad models working out there. Her supposed ulterior motive blown when she saw what the rest of the gym rats really looked like, she spent a few minutes laughing at my workout, calling it ‘wimpy’.

That’s my girl.

Total calories for the day: 1,509.  Fat: 125g, Net carbs: 24g, Protein: 61g (76/8/61%)

Tuesday, April 3, 2012 – 207.2

A good day mood-wise. I exercised. I like the Fitbit. I want to get than damn number up in the display. Get it higher. I’m frustrated in what it doesn’t track, though in all practicality I think where I’d have to put it to track more stuff might be a bit off-putting.

A not so good day on the food front. Perhaps, as one commenter noted, I didn’t get enough calories yesterday and it hit me today. 1/2 of a blueberry donut started it, and when I got home, a ravenousness hit and I had quinoa with cheese, 2 baked potatoes with an obscene amount of butter, and chinese dumplings. Oh yeah – there’s still some of those Lindt chocolate balls from Xmas hiding out – though not as many now.

Total calories for the day: 3089.  Fat: 346g, Net carbs: 215, Protein: 98g (71/21/9%)

Wednesday, April 4, 2012 – 206.4

So after yesterday – yesterday! – I lose nearly a pound and my blood glucose is 104. I figured the bolus of 200 grams of carbs near bed would push the blood glucose higher than it typically is – and doubling the calories alongside it would increase weight – but no.

I’m beginning to wonder what’s really going on here.

If I look back to the time last year when I lost weight (25-30 pounds), I ate carbs. It was the way I did it that mattered, I think. First off – really sad face here for all you drinkers – I stopped drinking. While suspect of all science at the moment, the explanation here is that alcohol gets top priority for getting burned by your body and if it’s getting burned, the other stuff ain’t. There might be more – who knows? Second, like I said, I ate carbs.

I’m sure if you’ve been hanging around the low carb joints like this one on the web, you’ve heard of ‘carb cycling’. This is where you have a weekly carb blowout. Low carb 6 days, high carb 1 day – wash, rinse, repeat.

I never tried it myself – or maybe I do it all the time, though I call them ‘mishaps’ and the timing is off.

Anyway, what I did during this weight loss period was do my carb cycling daily - very low carb during the day, and in the evening I had carbs, and tried to make sure I had plenty of fat to go along with it. I indulged, but tried not to overindulge. I didn’t go hungry, didn’t feel deprived – and lost weight.

Then it stopped working – which is why I am here right now writing this.

If you think about it, why should carb cycling be once every 7 days? 7 is a biblical time span – it’s not a biological one, like our sleep cycles or a woman’s menstrual cycle. Why not every 5 days? Or 10 days…or every day?

I don’t have much in the way of answers on this right now – all I can do is share the questions and mull it over.

Eating for the day was close to ideal – at least this week’s notion of ideal. A little cream and greek yogurt in the AM, then 2 ounces of roast beef with this most incredible Belgian butter with sea salt, then the evening was some sour cream and some pork rinds, some smoke oysters, some cheese, home-made chicken soup – and a strawberry.

I exercised as well, continuing at the new weight of 75 pounds for each machine. Either I’m getting weaker or that 5 pound bump in weight is a really big deal.

As I typically get my Fitbit to record about 8,000-9,000 steps a day, I wanted to get it over 10k, so I took an extra-long walk at work. It was sunny and warm in the Northeast, great for a walk, and something kept me in more or less a good mood throughout the day.

My blood glucose ranged from 95 to 113 during the day. I forgot the tester at work, so no evening measurements. I think I’m going to quit measuring for the time being and save the strips to see if there’s much of a change in a few weeks. With increased activity, I should have better glucose or so they say.

Total calories for the day: 1,562.  Fat: 126g, Net carbs: 29g, Protein: 71g (74/8/19%)

Thursday, April 5, 2012 – 205.6

Damn, I am sore. I’ve avoided soreness for the most part with the increased exercise, but today I feel it. I’ve been trying to avoid the canola-based Cesar salad dressing as well as the Atkins shakes, in case you haven’t noticed. I’ve been trying to move away from the higher omega-6 oils, and Dave Brown’s comment about pain possibly brought about by it made me try that much harder – but I’m achy today – I guess 2 days isn’t enough – or something else entirely is going on.

A good day for walking as I took an extra-long walk and got lost in it listening to music. It was a stressful afternoon and I did gobble up 3 zucchini with a large chunk of cheddar cheese I brought from home late afternoon. Still hungry I had an Atkins shake in a meeting – my first this week I think?

On the way home I stopped at a grocery store and eyed burgers and cheese, but was put off by the prices there., so I didn’t buy anything. When I got home, the wife and kids were out, but a container of scalloped potatoes was left on the counter, which I ate. I also had toast, and some more Lindt chocolates – and a good portion of one of those containers of Hagen Daz, which all by itself is 1,000 calories and 92 grams of carb – and considering there’s no fiber in ice cream, that’s net carbs.

Total calories for the day: 3,261.  Fat: 220g, Net carbs: 200g, Protein: 127g (59/26/15%)

Friday, April 6, 2012 – 204.0

Notice the pattern. I am repeatedly able to have days where I intake a large amount of carbs in the evening, pile on the calories as well – and the weight disappears – and takes some of its friends with it. Carbs usually make me retain water.

Oh yeah – my blood glucose, at 107 this morning, doesn’t seem very much different from if I hadn’t eaten carbs.

Saying it’s the exercise would be one conclusion to draw…but it doesn’t hold water. I’ve seen this trick occur before I began exercising.

While I can’t speculate too much on my lipid profile throughout all this, just looking at the weight and blood glucose, neither seem too negatively impacted.

I can’t help but feeling I’m missing something. I’m making an assumption that’s completely wrong.

Oddly, for me, I was in a supernaturally good mood. I had no external reason to be in any other mood than I was in yesterday. When this occurs, I usually attribute it to brain chemicals and enjoy the ride.

I had only black coffee in the AM, and brought in 3 of the uncured hot dogs made from grass-fed cows and had those, as well as a few Babybel cheeses during the day. I walked at lunch listening to music. It was a beautiful day to do it, though a jacket was required at least until I warmed myself up. The Fitbit is – without a doubt – motivating to walk more. I want to get above 10,000 steps a day now.

Where I walk has also become soothing. While the grounds around a nondescript corporate office building in central New Jersey whose architecture is only notable in that it perfectly meets the archetype of a nondescript office building circa late 20th century, the grounds around it host a pond, a small river with a wooden bridge, and enough random plants and trees – either by design or by opportunistic inclusion by the developers, that it’s a pleasant walk and easy on the eyes. There is enough green and water to allow me to pretend I am not walking around an office building.

Later in the afternoon, work over as well as the long commute, I stopped to exercise, which I skipped the day before from soreness. A much different response – I was much better able to get through the workout. For the first time since I upped the weight 5 pounds, it felt right. Perhaps I needed the recovery day from the weight training.

If people who weight trained spent any amount of time here, they might comment that I should be working different muscle group on subsequent days – and they’d be right. Everything I’ve read pointed to the fact that it is good to give your muscles time for recovery when doing weight training.

I’m ignoring this now because I’m not focusing on the exercise itself as much as developing the habit of exercising. For me, doing it wrong, losing no weight from it, and not doing enough of it are NOT sins.

The two important items I am focusing on right now is doing something pretty much every day, and not hurting myself.

Ans I am beginning to enjoy it. I can’t believe I’m saying this. As mentioned before, thinking about where I am going to fit in my exercise for the day has become a morning ritual. And while I have taken no steps towards it, I am wondering what   exercises I can do next. Cycling is out unfortunately (I’ll spare you the details), but I have a beautiful old canal dug in the 1800s near home that rent out kayaks as well as a big beautiful park with kayaks a 10-minute ride from here. This might be my next thing.

As to eats in the evening, I gave myself permission to indulge. My experiments so far have yielded so much seemingly contradictory evidence, I allowed myself a good-natured surrender to my desires. When I got home, I had some of these small almond cookies my wife likes, and checked my blood glucose about 10 minutes after – 140. A half-hour later – 104.

Really, for a guy pushing 50 where his father, mother, sister and brother all developed full-blown diabetes – and his siblings had it in their early 40s – that’s not that bad, really. And there are even times when it goes into the 80s, though I’ve yet to detect a pattern for this.

Anyway, back to food, I had a desire of hamburgers – the type made from hormone and antibiotic-infused cattle, accented with the complex flavor notes from the addition of pink slime, and sold at the local supermarket for $3.00 a pound.

My older daughter was also into it, and wanted to go to the local craft store near the supermarket to pick up supplies for a project she wanted to do, so we took a trip together. I picked up the hamburger, the store-brand white bread pesticide-laden GMO flour hamburger rolls then went to the deli for some cheese. While getting the cheese I got some of my favorite nitrated bologna, which I ate tooling through the store as it was nearing 8pm and I only had 3 hot dogs and 3 Babybel cheeses all day.

Back home, my daughter and I made burgers. I decided to have buns, but reduce the impact by making my hamburgers enormous, perhaps twice the size in diameter, which you math nerds know increases the volume by a bit more than 3.

I had two of these, with copious amounts of seltzer. When I drink this much liquid in the evening and eat like this, I know the scale won’t be kind, but it didn’t much matter to me at this point: I know I’ll be on a diet of some sort the rest of my life. Tonight was just about not giving a damn for a day and allowing my good mood free reign for a bit longer.

For dessert, I had more of the Lindt chocolates and some blueberry cornbread. I had made burgers and also bought fries for everyone and I offered my wife some. Still on the Ultramind – no wheat – no dairy – no sugar diet, and just having read up herself (not something told to her by her husband) on just how awful and polluted our modern food supply is, she hesitated at eating the burgers, though she was tempted.  She finally gave in and ate one with a big plate of organic veggies.

“I think I have a food phobia now.” She said while eating. “This hamburger tastes like hormones.”

“What do hormones taste like?” I asked.

“This hamburger.” She replied.

I’ll leave you that thought to ponder.

Total calories for the day: 3,502.  Fat: 367g, Net carbs: 150g, Protein: 210g (69/13/18%)

Saturday, April 7, 2012 – 209.4

I am not surprised by the scale’s mention of the weight gain. It’s all that Sodastream seltzer. A few hours after that weight, I was down to 207.

I do want to take a moment here, on Saturday, where I tend to do most of my reflection on the preceding week, to look back at the list of resolutions I made in December for the coming year and see how I’m doing so far. This beats reflection on the past week, which was nothing like I had intended.

1. Weight 185 lbs. Well, I get a big fat zero for that one so far, but I haven’t thrown the towel in yet. Bummer, eh? That’s why most of you probably read this: to see if the fat guy loses that 20 lbs.
2. Give up nicotine. Done. I was ready. I still have a nasty Altoid problem, but this is trivial in comparison.
3. Eat better. Undecided. Maybe – overall – yes. But what my doctor and what a nutritionist might think would be ‘better’ would be in conflict with my definition. Perhaps I need to clarify what this means. I HAVE given up diet soda completely. I used to use the Sodastream soda mix habitually – I just drink the seltzer straight ot drink some milk on occasion.
4. Exercise. When I wrote this, I had about as much confidence I would get anywhere here as I would have if I had written ‘invent antigravity device’. Surprise, surprise, this had been the first ‘doing’ goal (as opposed to ‘not doing’ something) that I have made real progress in so far. This one is shaky though. An injury or some other event could bring this one to a halt easy enough. I need to carefully tend the habit of exercise like growing a delicate plant. As I’ve stated before: it’s not the exercise itself that’s important right now, it’s the habit of exercise that needs to be so ingrained in my neural circuits that it becomes second nature. We CAN rewire our brains – for good or bad – but changing lifetime habits are tough and require dogged persistence.
5. Simplify my life. No way. Still way too complicated for my taste.
6. Reduce coffee consumption. A little progress. I had reduced it by 60-80 percent and couldn’t stay awake in the evenings. I did get in the habit of drinking a less strong brew, so I’d guess I’ve cut back by 20-30%.

You can find the previous week’s posts here, if you’re interested.

Sunday, March 25, 2012 – 202.2

It was rainy in the Northeast US, and I was sore. I especially felt it in my shoulders where I focus my weight exercise, and also in the legs, probably because I’ve walked a lot more in the past week.

As I had ran out of heavy cream, morning coffee was with 2 tablespoons of butter (don’t knock it until you try it). I quickly guzzled down a pot of java while finishing up last week’s installment of this 12-week…what: lesson in futility? Saga? Misadventure? Call it what you will, but after that it was a trip to Wal-Mart to stock up on keto sticks and Atkins Shakes.

This turned into an interesting day, from an experimental standpoint, because of pad Thai. We had made some – actually, Trader Joe’s did – I just warmed it up for the kids, but it proved too spicy for them. So I ate it – the entire thing. This was after a day of high calories, exercise,  and low carb – nothing much different in the way of diet than the past week, except I was hungry.

A period of WTF set in after that, and I made short work of half a croissant and some dried strawberries, and dutifully noted this in my LoseIt! app, which I have come to hate less.

I also thought this an ideal time to give myself a home-made ‘glucose intolerance test’. I had just consumed what I had estimated was about 100 grams of carbs. How would my body react? I had finished up at 7pm. Before bed I got in 2 measurements:

• 15 minutes after: 125
• 45 minutes after: 113

Total calories for the day: 3,748. Fat: 263g, Net carbs: 160g, Protein: 172g (62/20/18%)

Monday, March 26, 2012 – 204.4

Weight aside, a big part of this 12-week made-up self-imposed program is health. So it’s interesting to note that my fasting blood glucose when I awoke this morning at 4:30am was 146. Right or wrong, if I were to have gotten a blood test by my doctor with that measurement, I would be called a full-blown diabetic.

It’s more complicated than that, however. It’s a snapshot on a particular day, from a person with a metabolism pretty much fine-tuned to not take in a lot of fast absorbing carbs, who just happened to do so. It also appears that a lot of times my morning glucose goes up regardless of carbs eaten (it was 132 last week during a period of ketosis) – that ‘dawn effect’ my reader, John, let me know about.

I also don’t have much in the way of a current period of regular high-carb intake to compare this to. It could be a matter that my body is not ‘carb acclimated’ and would handle this better if it got a regular intake of carbs. I also recall instances last year when I was measuring blood glucose regularly and would have a blowout – and the next morning the blood glucose would plunge - 20 points down from normal.

So as I mentioned, this is an awfully complicated process. It isn’t just high-carb intake = high blood sugar. There’s a complicated interrelationship that I think is highly personal, and it’s hard to come to many clear conclusions, except to say: I’m probably better off on a low carb diet than I am on a high carb diet.

For today, as an example, I woke up with the blood glucose at 146. In an hour it had gone to 128, an hour after that 101. 2 hours later, eating nothing but 1 ounce of roast beef and 1 tablespoon of butter, it was 132. By mid morning, after an Atkins shake, it had gone down to 116. For some reason, there seems to be a weak correlation between fasting and blood glucose.

My wife invited me to lunch at Maggiano’s, a pretty decent Italian chain restaurant. I had:

• 2 jumbo mushroom caps stuffed with spinach and topped with seasoned breadcrumbs, served in a garlic white wine sauce
• Balsamic-glazed salmon baked on cedar paper with spinach mixed with sun-dried tomatoes

As both my wife and I were suffering from a bad case of the Mondays, this was a great way to battle it, though not exactly the easiest thing to put into my calorie-counting app as Maggiano’s do not list their calorie count. Obviously there was sugar and starch in this lunch, but I was hoping not that much.

What seemed unusual was that this relatively small meal was so filling that I didn’t eat until 8:30 when I finally pulled the roast garlic chicken I prepped over the weekend out of the convection oven. I also had some pork rinds, some butter, some cooked garlic cloves, and some Trader Joe’s wasabi almonds – and dutifully noted these in my LoseIt! app to the best of my ability.

I also noted that I was in ketosis in the evening, which I can’t for the life of me explain since I had maybe 100 grams of carbs at a single serving yesterday. Had my body been so carb-depleted after 6 solid days of ketosis that it doesn’t want to switch back? This is pure speculation, of course. I don’t think there’s much research in these sorts of things out there. Ketosis, while probably more common in prehistory, is not all that common today, and it’s treated more as a curiosity by most researchers outside of the low carb community and doctors who treat epilepsy with it.

Total calories for the day: 3,140.  Fat: 263g, Net carbs: 26g, Protein: 166g (74/6/21%)

Tuesday, March 27, 2012 – 204.2

Light ketosis yesterday am. Heavy ketosis yesterday pm. No ketosis on this morning. Curious. Were the ketones leftovers? Did the ketogenic process need time to ‘wind down’? Had lots of cream in my coffee – double the normal amount. In work I had butter in my coffee and an Atkins shake. I had close to 700 calories before 9am.

Believe it or not – I was full for a while, then got a bit peckish early afternoon and had a yogurt and 5 ounces of roast beef and 6 tablespoons of butter. I took my blood glucose throughout the day and it was remarkable in that it was more or less the same as previous days: it starts out high, and meanders down and then up then down again, seemingly unresponsive to what I eat, though it tends to rise when I don’t eat.

I pushed a big project out the door at work today. It had been hanging around a long time, and I was anxious for closure, but afterward, I felt a bit sad. I’ve seen this before on projects: it’s a postpartum depression of sorts. It might be diet-related – might not – it’s cold in the Northeast and the weather impacts my mood as well.

Went home and exercised, then took my blood glucose right after: 85. The lowest it’s been since I started measuring this year.

I also tested for ketosis – and I’m back – the pad Thai carbs apparently flushed from my system.

Dinner was 2 hot dogs and caesar dressing, and some green beans sautéed in olive oil.

I got the kids pizza, but abstained.

Sometimes it’s hard to notice non-events, but I’ve noticed that I haven’t been as tired in the evenings.

Total calories for the day: 2858.  Fat: 262g, Net carbs: 20g, Protein: 103g (81/4/14%)

Wednesday, March 28, 2012 – 203.2

In ketosis and morning fasting blood glucose is 118. Oddly hungry in the morning. You would think that the calorie intake would reduce the hunger, but paradoxically, the hunger is high today. I indulged myself by stopping at ShopRite, a Northeast grocery chain, for some of their bologna. This is a comfort food of mine going back to my childhood. I figured some wouldn’t hurt, and I asked for the nutrition count. As the deli guy read it to me and I didn’t have anything to write on nor a photographic memory, I only recall it was 5 grams of carbs a serving – a bit high. I wrote ShopRite directly for the nutrition info, but they warned on the site not to hold your breath for an answer, so I used the numbers for Boar’s Head Bologna but bumped up the carbs to 5 grams as a placeholder until ShopRite gets back to me – if ever.

It was yummy. I had it for breakfast. Perhaps a bit much, on top of my cream and melted butter in my coffee. I checked my blood sugar a little while later and the number read 241. Woah. Let’s make sure that’s not a mistake. I stabbed myself twice more – it was more like 125. That particular strip was a bit wonky.

Let me also note that once the 100 strips I bought are gone – I’m done for a while. I’ve gotten some good data on my blood glucose throughout the day and I see no need to continue this much further. My fingertips are getting like pincushions and the strips cost me $50 bucks.

I was – not surprisingly – rather full for most of the day, but by mid-afternoon had gotten hungry again, and had my Atkins shake. A bit later I had some of the cheese I bought along with the bologna, and eating it out of the package it came in I ended up eating 7 ounces – as well as the remainder of the bologna. And I was still kinda hungry.

I also was not in the greatest of moods – again. Mood is a tough thing. It can be situational, chemical, or both. How the Hell are you supposed to tell? Especially when mood impairs judgement? I always try to detach from the mood, understanding that it is not ‘me’, and that on previous days I’ve had more or less the exact same problems yet felt much happier, and that moods pass.

Being in a crappy mood is still crappy when you do this, but it tends not to spiral out of control as much as it would if I thought differently.

Perhaps it was this crappy mood that prompted me to buy a FitBit. The Fitbit is a 21st century pedometer of sorts that connects to the Internet to help the measurement-obsessed add even more data to their lives. As I am actually trying to exercise regularly (pinch me – am I actually saying that?), I thought that it might be an interesting feedback mechanism.

It certainly is interesting from an industrial design standpoint. It is clip-shaped and you can wear it on or in a pocket – woman can clip it to their bra. It (somehow) measures steps, and also contains an altimeter so it can tell you how many flights of stairs you walked up in a day. It also calculates your BMR (I guess – they don’t go into a lot of detail on how it works) and provides you with how many calories you’ve burned so far during the day. It’s motion detector also feeds this ‘activity’ back into the calorie number and is supposed to do the math for you on how many extra calories you can consume as calculated by this gadget.

Somehow I feel as if I’ve been given a religious item from a religion I don’t believe in. This is 21st century calories-in-calories-out-BMR-exercise=calories burned – at least from what I’ve seen so far.

I have 29 days to return it.

It has an endearing ‘personality’ for an object. When you pick it up, it addresses you by name somewhat randomly, which gives it more personality than a typical machine. Picking it up this morning, it said on its tiny screen (it’s no bigger than my thumb) “IM READY LCC”.

It does have many limitations – like not displaying ” DONT DO IT LCC” when I ate 2 slices of leftover pizza from the day before, then continued on, not cheating exactly, but taking in way more food than necessary, with caesar salad, peppers and eggs, and more wasabi almonds. The FitBit should have warned me.

The numbers below are my best guess estimate.

Total calories for the day: 3975.  Fat: 289g, Net carbs: 138g, Protein: 167g (67/16/17%)

Thursday, March 29, 2012 – 205.0

Blood glucose 114 – lower than the previous day when I didn’t  have carbs. Again, the relationship here is not simple. Not particularly thrilled at the 2 pound weight gain – I am trying to lose weight here – but still curious as to how I can eat so much and gain so little. I’ve eaten half the calories and gained more.

Dave Brown left a comment that eating a lot of calories can lead to weight loss through 2 vehicles that might work in tandem: a change in gut bacteria that essentially bumps up the metabolism. He left a link as well and I have to read it.

We also need to take into account that, looking at my fluctuations, they can be entirely explained away by water retention. I have hovered around 205 with higher carbs and lower carbs – high calories and low calories.

Perhaps this is what my body wants to weight. Perhaps I should just up the exercise and accept this number. I’ve had 2 people tell me ‘how skinny’ I look, and my wife has started calling me ‘scrawny’. I’m only a few pounds away from obese in the BMI however. I don’t want to go too low – my target of 185 is still overweight by the BMI – it’s just less overweight than I am now.

Regardless, I am halfway through this experiment and I’d like to finish it. Sometimes the results you get from something are not what you expected, but what you needed.

Isn’t that a Rolling Stones song?

Anyway, the blood glucose seemed lower for the entire day. Butter and not cream in the AM? Or did the carbs from the previous day have some impact? Tough to say – correlation does not mean causation, or put another way: there might not be any relationship with anything I’m measuring.

Feeling a bit depressed – I ate less during the day. I didn’t starve – I just ate less. Roast beef, butter, yogurt, and a shake. Blood glucose stayed in the 90s except for when I ate – then it only went up to 108 at its highest.

I also walked around with the Fitbit on. Kinda neat. It supposedly counts footsteps, but what it really seems to be counting is its own ‘activity units’. That’s fine. If I get a baseline using this number, then I can compare days to see differences in activity. Might be useful. we’ll see. We’ll also see if the novelty wears off and it becomes just another ‘thing’.

Feeling especially tired today, and had to skip exercise to take my older daughter to one of her afterschool classes. My wife usually does it, but couldn’t – which was fine – I had already decided to blow off the exercise for the day.

Unfortunately, I was real hungry, and her class being near a grocery store, I knew what I was going to do. This was no ‘alien hand syndrome’ – this was premeditated. I got myself an Italian hero and ate that, then went home and had some toast and butter.

I dutifully notes this in my calorie-counting LoseIt! app, but – how the Hell do I enter an Italian hero? It’s a local thing – and you might not even know what I’m talking about. It is a sandwich on a long Italian or French bread, or a baguette with Italian deli ingredients like provolone cheese, Genoa salami, some ham, lettuce, onion, olive oil & vinegar. In some places it’s called a hoagie, in others a grinder.

I used as a replacement the Subway chain ‘Italian Sandwich’ – the numbers for that are as good as any, I suppose.

Tired as I mentioned, I went to bed early.

I noticed my carbs seemed awfully high – 415 grams. How could this be? Well, the calorie-counting app LoseIt! lies! For the bread I had I used the bar code reader to input it. It came up with bread and I didn’t look at the numbers. When I took as second look, it came up with 360 grams of carbs for 2 slices.

Calorie counting sucks.

Total calories for the day: 2,508.  Fat: 304g, Net carbs: 80g, Protein: 10g (77/11/11%)

Friday, March 30, 2012 – 204.8

My reward for the carb indulgence yesterday? Blood glucose the lowest AM reading since I started this: 97. Weight statistically unchanged, and real numbers a tiny bit lower. I’m implying causation here, but in reality I don’t have a clue if one is related to another. The highest I recorded was 109. I forgot the tester in work, so those of you bored with blood glucose readings will be spared for 2 days.

I still have the Fitbit, however, and I must admit that I find it somewhat charming. I had doubts about its ability to measure steps so I took 50 steps and looked at its display. I’ll be damned – it was only off by one. I’m still skeptical, however, and will do further tests like this.

Another positive aspect to it is: it doesn’t chirp, beep, or make any sound whatsoever. I’m tired of electronics that incorporate useless sounds – in work I hear a cacophony of them from people’s cel phones and computers. This thing is quiet – I like that.

It also sends me emails when I reach goals that it set up for me – I’d be too lazy to set these goals, so I do find it encouraging that it send me an email saying I’ve walked 10,000 steps. Jeez – I didn’t know I was so active. I took a walk at lunch, and I think it might have been partly because of this little gadget.

Eats didn’t really go to plan – I know what you’re thinking: Plan?!? I can see no discernible plan whatsoever!

Well, there *is* a plan – I just follow it so horribly that you can’t detect it.

The plan is supped to be: eat high fat, low carb, moderate protein, and I do pretty good during the day. Butter in my coffee and butter with roast beef, along with a yogurt and a can of tuna. Mood was OK .

But evening was a different matter. It seems that even with the caloric intake increased over previous weeks where I was trying caloric restriction, I was hungry. And hungry for carbs. Again, no alien hand syndrome here – this was premeditated.

I skipped exercise a second time and, at the kid’s behest, went to the store to pick up some of the store-made mac and cheese, and chicken wings. I thought to myself I’d have a taste and eat to plan after, but when I got home, my wife had taken the kids out, leaving just me and the mac.

You can guess what happened next.

After that I had some peppers and eggs – nothing wrong there – and then an old comfort food favorite: a cheese sandwich with lettuce and mayo. And them more cheese and bread an mayo to boot.

My wife, who has been abstaining from goodies because of her Ultramind diet, hid her stash of chocolate. unfortunately for both her and me, she is the worst ‘hider’ in the history of hiding, and while I ate the last KitKat, I reflected that: somebody had to do it.

I also found a few Lindt chocolate balls and had those as well.

Satisfied, I went to bed and dutifully recorded my eating – for science.

Total calories for the day: 3,175.  Fat: 229g, Net carbs: 140g, Protein: 131g (65/19/16%)

Saturday, March 31, 2012 – 206.0

The weekly summary for this week seems to show it doesn’t much matter what I eat. This week, eating pounds of butter, and consuming an average of 3,200 calories – almost doubling the amount of calories from week 2, for example, doesn’t reflect in the numbers. the 206.0 for today would not look out-of-place in a previous week where I ate 6-7,000 fewer calories!

Isn’t that kind of phenomenal? Remarkable? It certainly wasn’t compensated with additional exercise – my routine was unchanged, in fact, I skipped my pathetic 7-minute weight workout 2 days in a row.

So where did all those calories go, you people who believe that I defy physics by taking more calories in without gaining weight?

There’s an old ‘law’ of biology used by snarky and frustrated researchers that goes like this:

“Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, humidity, and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.”

I certainly appear to be that organism. Right now the formula seems to be:

Unlimited fat + controlled carbs = weight maintenance.

Notice I didn’t say ‘low carb’ – I’ve eaten bread and candy and mac & cheese. But I still averaged 60% or more calories from fat. And it appears that total calories don’t matter. My weight still hovers in a narrow range. Nor was I some blazing furnace this week, giving off a glow from all the calories I was burning. In fact, I was taking my temperature here and there the past few days – my temperature stayed in the 97 degree range, only getting to 98.4 once.

So they had to go somewhere - right? Perhaps I just excreted them? I feed my body and it only takes what it needs and tosses the rest?

Given the data, it’s plausible.

For a moment, assume my hypothesis is correct (I don’t know if it is – I might be misinterpreting the data). Flipping this a bit bring to mind some other questions I don’t have the answer to.

1. Are there certain foods that override my body’s tendency to discard calories, absorb more and make me gain weight?
2. What is the mechanism – if any – that can be used to make my body discard more calories – and lose weight.

To be continued…

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…

I think I’m going to stop eating avocados as it seems they make me hungry. Though low carb and good for you, they might be one of those foods that I have an idiosyncratic response to.

I got the blood work back from the endocrinologist. Nothing worrisome enough to treat. Testosterone 614. A1C ‘slightly elevated’ at 5.9, fasting blood glucose 110. No mention of thyroid at all, so I suppose that nothing is wrong there either – I’m expecting the actual results in the mail this week and will review it for more detail.

Getting into ketosis was another big milestone – only took me 3 months…I do indeed suck at low carb – it’s just that I am persistent.

For the coming week I’d like to focus on:

• Continuing the exercise thing. Don’t get any more ambitious than I currently am. If I do this week exactly what I did last week, I’ve hit a home run. It’s not how many reps, on what machine, and at what weight that matters – it’s instilling a habit that becomes an unconscious part of my life that’s most important.
• Stay in ketosis. This can be tricky because the keto sticks don’t always measure ketones accurately, and sometimes too much protein can allow your body to produce enough glucose to thwart ketosis. Really, the focus is not on measurement as much as following a course of healthy low carb eating.
• Continue the calorie-counting. As much as I loathe calorie-counting and believe that it is part of a diabolical plan to make us eat processed food (explained in this post), I still feel that it a great guide to monitoring intake for a short period of time to allow one to get a better feel of what portion control looks like. Once you internalize what adequate portions are, you can drop the calorie-counting like a hot potato.
• Once again, bring my focus back to what ‘healthy eating’ is. The Atkins shakes have helped me as they do indeed satisfy my appetite and keep me feeling full and content way beyond the calories contained in them. I just don’t want to live my life dependent on processed foods. Being pragmatic, however, I don’t need to adhere to all-or-nothing thinking, and keeping these to one-a-day isn’t a big deal in the larger scheme of things if it helps me get to my target weight of 185.

Sunday, March 11, 2012 – 203.4

After my morning infusion of coffee, I had an Atkins shake at about 9:30, followed by a few leftover pepperoni from the pizza the other day. I had some kimchi, the Korean pickled vegetables about mid afternoon. I worked around the house, and exercised, and had a yogurt. I also had some roast beef wrapped in babybel cheese and then pork rinds with salsa.  I also drank a lot of water. Whenever I have this unusual thirst, I know the scale will be unkind. Something was amiss. I was a bit hyper, energetic – almost manic. Not in a bad way – just not my usual self, though.

About 5pm the bell rang and our neighbor’s son had sent over a tray of home-baked cupcakes for my daughter (they’re both 5).

I had one without thinking (Diet? What diet?) – and it was off to the races. I recall some Lindt chocolate, a slice of bread with butter and lots of port rinds with salsa.

As is usual when I do this now – I felt sick afterward. Not guilt or some emotional thing – just sick like I wanted to puke. I went to bed early. Oh boy, what’s the scale going to say tomorrow?

Total calories for the day (rough estimate): 2327. Fat: 165g, Net carbs: 92g, Protein: 117g (63/17/20%)

Monday, March 12, 2012 – 205.6

Progress! Last week’s blowout made me gain 7 pounds – this one only 2.2. Really, in the total scheme of things, one day out of the past 7, with calories still relatively low, this transgression isn’t all that much. Scale’s not happy, but I’ll recover. In general, I’m still going in the right direction. Weekends are always tough.

I awoke with numbness in my right arm this morning – notable only because this used to be a daily occurrence for me when I was fat – now it happens so rarely that it strikes me as worth noting here. Did the carbs last night have something to do with it? I have no clue.

The wife had made brisket the night before, and we also had some leftover zucchini with ham cooked in butter. I brought that for lunch and guesstimated the nutrition info. I had the shake at noon and the leftovers mid afternoon, and that left me satisfied for the day. Stopped to exercise on the way home, and cooked in the evening with the wife and kid. Hungry, I picked on stuff while they cooked – a bit of pork rinds with salsa, some kimchi, some of the sausage from the leftover soup, a can of tuna with mayo.

The wife and kid ate trout and zucchini – I was at my caloric max by then.

Total calories for the day: 1617.  Fat: 123g, Net carbs: 9g, Protein: 110g (69/4/28%)

Tuesday, March 13, 2012 – 204.0

Had a mean case of the hungries and the grumpies today. Had 2 shakes for breakfast – the first one didn’t seem to do anything. I even thought of stopping for a deli sandwich on the way in to work – I haven’t thought that in a while.

I resisted, though I did have a yogurt and 4 ounces of beef and half a stick of butter by 1pm. I had such a grump on I walked around the office building three times. I find myself looking to exercise (the pathetic amount I do) as medicine now. It helped a bit, but I still had work itself to get me all ornery again.

Came home, stopped to exercise, and it seemed tougher than yesterday. When I got home I wasn’t necessarily hungry as much as thirsty, so I grabbed a bottle of water – but before I did I tested for ketones and weighed myself. The keto stick was dark red and the weight was 202.2.

It was a perfect night for an Atkins shake and bed, as I was in no mood for anything – but my daughter felt sick, and I went to the kitchen to get her something…and all Hell broke loose. It was unconscious eating – 1/2 McDonald’s Hamburger, a leftover bit of bagel with cream cheese, then a pile of cream cheese on a piece of bread. Not satisfied – or a case of WTF setting in, I had maybe 6 lindt chocolates, 2 kit kats, and maybe 1/2 dozen of these thin almond cookies.

Now, as the LoseIt! app scans bar codes, it makes it easy to quantify this blowout.

Total calories for the day: 2450.  Fat: 158g, Net carbs: 120g, Protein: 100g (60/23/17%)

Wednesday, March 14, 2012 – 202.6

I’ve seen this happen before. Curious, isn’t it? The ‘eat candy and lose weight’ diet. While I’m happy the scale went down, I’m not trying to perfect the candy diet and I don’t believe candy is all that healthy for you – I just still can’t reckon having a relatively high-calorie, high-carb day (including candy) – and losing weight. Perhaps everyone is wrong about what brings about weight loss? Or maybe just a little statistical ‘blip’ that mean nothing. Tough to quantify when you’re an experiment of one – and a bad subject to boot.

The day actually didn’t turn out bad, I returned to my regular grumpy self (as opposed to extra-grumpy) at work, wasn’t really hungry, continued the daily exercise streak and it almost seemed I was going to go to bed with only 500 calories or so in me – 2 shakes and a can of tuna don’t add up to much. I thought that a bit low for health, even though I wasn’t hungry and had 2 hot dogs on lettuce, some pork rinds and butter and salsa, ans some asparagus.

I had mentioned ‘when hungry eat, when tired sleep’ as a goal last week – and broke it because I thought eating too little might be harmful…but is it? I’m trying to get thin – not get sick, but I have so little faith in the accurate interpretation of science surrounding nutrition and health that I wonder if it would have been totally harmless not to eat.

Total calories for the day: 1253.  Fat: 88g, Net carbs: 9g, Protein: 94g (64/5/30%)

Thursday, March 15, 2012 – 202.2

If I recall, the Ides of March wasn’t all that great a day for Caesar, either…

If you don’t mind, we’re going to have to put this day down as my 12-week plan version of a ‘Get Out of Jail Free Card’. It was a very stressful day at work and while I brought healthy stuff, I needed a reward, so at lunch I went out and bought mortadella and american cheese. I feel sorry for people on strict low-calorie diets – what do they do – have an extra rice cake?

Problem was – I ate a bit much, and it made me awfully thirsty, so I had a diet soda – the first I can remember since last year. No biggie, but the appetite was not under control. I also forgot my keys in the car, which I never do – I think it reflects just how distracted and stresses I was. I’m also coming down with a cold. I exercised, but it was the hardest it’s been since the beginning. I had to drag myself there, and my self-talk that tried to talk me out of it had a hard time convincing me I couldn’t do 10 freakin’ minutes.

I had certainly eaten my fill by the time I had gotten home, hung with the kids and wife, and I went to bed, but hunger was gnawing at me, so I raided the fridge: pizza, baguette with butter, some home-made apple pie. A Lindt chocolate or 2. I also downed a liter of seltzer, which with all the carbs I ate, will slosh around in me for a few days.

When I’ve had blowouts before, when I tallied the calories, it really wasn’t all that bad. Regardless, I had too many itsy-bitsies, so I’m sure my tally is off a bit.

Summary: I fucked up – now to get over it and try again tomorrow.

One small ray of hope: my wife, who really has no need for a diet from a weight perspective, is going on the Ultramind Solution Diet to feel better – and this restricts sugar, dairy and wheat. Not a perfect overlap, but it might reduce the number of goodies I can find about the house when in the vacuum-cleaner mode.

Total calories for the day: 2,879.  Fat: 205, Net carbs: 104g, Protein: 141g (64/16/20%)

Friday, March 16, 2012 – 205.6 

The shake on the way to work, then some roast beef and butter. Early afternoon I found myself, seemingly helpless, going  to Dunkin Donuts for an extra-large coffee with cream. The thing is huge, and assuming 180 calories for the cream might be too low – and it’s not like the crack team at Dunkin Donuts uses a graduated cylinder to measure the stuff out. I also found my self – again, seemingly helpless, eating an emergency Atkins bar stowed away in the car.

My stomach not feeling at all well in the afternoon, I had another Atkins shake on the way home while wondering if anyone attempted to make a low carb White Russian with one of these by adding vodka. A passing idle thought, since I don’t drink at present.

At home I stopped to exercise and went through my routine rather quickly, though a bit sore. I ran through 2 rounds of the 3 machines rather quick – maybe too quick, as I found myself dizzy and winded for a brief spell, then finished up after a rest. I did calculate that the 70 pounds on each of the 3 machines at 10 repetitions is me hauling a little more than 1 ton each time – so I’m moving 3 tons of metal each workout.

When I got home, the wife wanted to get out of the house – she worked from home and was restless. We ended up walking the neighborhood, then took a ride for coffee for her and a walk in our nearby downtown.

At least 3 days this past week I’ve walked for at least 20-30 minutes, just because I felt like it. I think exercise leads to exercise naturally, which is perhaps why I am so conflicted about it: some people think it a moral imperative to exercise – I like to look at things I do in life in a joyful fashion. It’s all play – everything – when you approach it in the right way, and it’s a helluva less miserable and sanctimonious way to go through life.

Despite the fact I didn’t get home and settled in until after 9pm, I still went on a tear in the kitchen and had a mortadella and cheese sandwich – yes, with 2 slices bread, some pasta (it was sitting on the counter, just asking for it), some asparagus, and a huge portion – maybe 8-10 ounces – of skirt steak leftover from earlier in the week. I topped that off with the remains of the Lindt chocolate candy that I ate on my wife the other day – she can’t have it on her diet – so it’s like I was doing her a favor…right?

Total calories for the day: 2,966.  Fat: 198g, Net carbs: 85g, Protein: 175g (61/15/24%)

Saturday, March 10, 2012 – 204.0

Strange week, for a number of reasons. I started at 203.4, and ended at 204.0 – a 0.6 pound difference is insignificant. I also ate a lot, ate a little, was in ketosis – and wasn’t – and my weight stayed within a 3-pound range. If all this was simple calories in-calories out, I’d gain weight when I eat a lot of calories, and lose when I ate a few. Instead, the week shows that I ate more than I planned and lost weight – and ate less and lost weight.

When you look at it, really, it seems that nothing I do - short-term at least – matters. I can eat double the amount of calories from one day to the next and maintain my weight just fine.

Right at this moment I am wondering if I should try to go low-calorie next week or high calorie. Maybe I should try the ‘fat fast’ notion and get the fat up and eat near 3000 calories – just to see what happens. I’m toying with the idea.

As it’s the weekend after a very stressful week, it might be a good idea to tackle the ‘eating quality food’ issue, as I don’t think I really covered that this past week. Some of what I ate was OK, but I don’t consider Atkins shakes or pork rinds ‘health food’. I think they’re OK – a shake a day for convenience and the pork rinds as an occasional snack are fine – the rest should be real food.

To this end I’ve lined up the ingredients from this ‘Mexican kale recipe‘ but will substitute spinach and make a bunch – see if I can subsist on this for a number of meals this week. I’m also going to try a cauliflower pizza crust recipe one commenter suggested.

If I succeeded anywhere this week, it was in continuing the exercise habit, or the ‘practice’ of exercise. I keep relating it to meditation, and approach it in the same way – a practice, not focused on the quality, or counting, or really going anywhere with it at present. I do the same brief workout every day – and that’s it. I don’t bother to count the exercise in my calorie counter because I don’t believe that exercise helps you lose weight – and I’m not doing this: “I exercised X and burned X calories, and now I can eat the equivalent in Snackwells cookies.”

I’m not exercising to lose weight. I’m exercising to exercise. Might it help with weight loss? Might I get some muscle definition? Might it improve my metabolic rate? Might it lead to better health?

Maybe – maybe not. It’s not why I’m exercising. If I was doing it for any of these reasons and they didn’t appear on some expected schedule, I might stop exercising. It’s exactly how one should approach meditation. Does meditation help with focus, concentration, calmness? Maybe  - but that’s not why you meditate. You meditate to meditate. It’s the end in itself.

I am less happy with the goal of calorie-counting. Not because I didn’t do it, but because I did. Calorie-counting sucks, and the only reason I am doing it is as a feedback mechanism. It’s an interesting data point, and I am hoping that it will reveal info I can use. Right now it’s told me that when ‘I eat a lot’ – some times it’s not a lot. A quick look on the Internet says an average guy should eat around 2500 calories a day. My average this week – if I didn’t screw up the average – was 2,250. I also seem to eat about 60% fat without trying. As to carbs, even on a day with me eating chocolates, my carb level – 120 – is still lower than what my doctor considered a ‘low carb diet’ – 150. The average was 65 grams.

As to eating this day, as is usual for the day after a lot of carbs, I was hungry early and had an Atkins shake. I also had 1 fried egg – a leftover from the eggs I cooked my younger daughter. With the wife at the dentist, the kids and I headed to the store to get the ingredients for ‘Bangers and Mash’ – the English pub meal of sausages, mashed potatoes, onions and brown gravy that is awesomely good – but none for Daddy (hopefully) – this is for the wife and kids. I’ll stick to my concoctions.

Around noon I had some kimchi, and a bit after that I went to make a hot dog for my younger daughter, went to the kitchen and found my older daughter had left most of a hot dog before leaving with my wife for the afternoon. I offered it to my younger daughter, but her 5-year-old palate isn’t sophisticated enough for mustard yet – she’s a ketchup-on-hot-dog kind of gal.

Before I knew what happened – I ate it. WTF?!? Then it happened again. A piece of old cheesecake – gone, just like that. Then half a tub of Hagen Daz Blueberry Crumble Ice Cream my daughter picked out at our earlier shopping trip. I dutifully recorded it in my LoseIt! iPhone application. Ok…it isn’t going to be a low carb day by any stretch, but I might be able to keep the calories to a reasonable amount…

I then did some research to figure out what was going on – it seemed that I had lost control or something. A quick search turned up the answer: Alien Hand Syndrome. From the article:

Alien hand syndrome (AHS) is a rare neurological disorder that causes hand movement without the person being aware of what is happening or having control over the action. The afflicted person may sometimes reach for objects and manipulate them without wanting to do so, even to the point of having to use the healthy hand to restrain the alien hand.

I told my daughter this when I explained that I ate half her ice cream. She didn’t buy it and told me it was: “because I had no backbone.”

“That hurts.” I told her.

Seriously, though, what I found strange was that after the ice cream, I was satisfied for hours. Usually, carbs set me off for an uncontrollable hunger. This didn’t. All I had the remainder of the day was some weak coffee and half-and half, then I did have a bit of the ‘bangers & mas’h I made for the family – mostly the sausage, some of the fried onion, and maybe a tablespoon or 2 of the potatoes.

Total calories for the day: 1,743.  Fat: 118g, Net carbs: 64g, Protein: 79g (63/18/19%)

To be continued…