Pigs Fly – Day 6

Sunday, July 10, 2016

The morning weigh-in showed I broke 270 – I was 269.6. That’s 8.4 lbs. in 6 days.

I’m still not impressed. I’ve made it to below 270 as recently as the beginning of June – only to spring back into the 270s – and most of last year was the 250s and 260s.

What is more impressive is my staying with my primary goal of portion control. I would agree with one correspondent that my diet is still ‘somewhat lacking’. Point taken. I also agree that I could probably use a little exercise – my schtick about dissing exercise being more sour grapes than anything.

But this is usually where the wheels fall off in most of my diet attempts. As I’ve gained ground during diet attempts in the past I’ve moved to being stricter: no Akins shakes because they are factory foods, only organic grass-fed beef, everything home-cooked, only homemade mayo, etc.

What would happen as I did this was that sticking to the diet would get harder – more steps – more stores – more restrictions – more time spent obsessing over the details. Nothing wrong if you find delight in this sort of thing but history shows I most certainly DON’T.

I feel OK as-is. I’ve noticed I have to hike up my pants more often. My stomach hurts less. I’ve pretty much stopped using Tums.

The battery in my glucose meter needs to be replaced so I haven’t checked, but I’m sure my blood glucose level is lower as well.

Why mess with things when they’re going well? It’s working – and it doesn’t feel like too much work. I feel I’m putting very little effort into this and that works for me.

Stay the course with a less-than-ideal diet that is a big improvement over my diet before I started, (hopefully) continue to lose weight, feel better, improve my energy levels as I acclimate to my new regimen and continue to focus on priority one: portion control.

There’s always time to improve the quality of foods I eat – and to maybe even start exercising – but that doesn’t have to start now – and might be the thing that paradoxically makes the diet fail because it’s too much, too soon.

Even if I lose every pound I want, this is still a lifelong change I need to make. There’s plenty of time for improvement – right now I need to be content to practice what I’ve learned so far before moving to the next level.

I also did want to comment on me writing all of this. I think the writing helps me sort out my thoughts and feelings on what I’m doing. Having an audience reading this rather than keeping it to myself causes me to be more careful in my thinking and provides comments from you folks that give me further food for thought. It *has* to be honest in order for this to work: if I was a poser – what good would your comments be? For me, it’s a critical part of the diet.

The day started as it usually does with coffee. A few dashes of Atkins shake as well to substitute for the cream I don’t have.

I wasn’t hungry yet, but at noon I conjured up a ‘Mexican Pork Belly and Eggplant’ dish with some leftover and ignored stuff I found in the house. I was inspired by looking through the 150+ so-called ‘recipes’ on the site. I’ve come up with some pretty good stuff. Some was awful. At this point I had not tasted my concoction so only the future would tell.

It made 6 servings and at 375 calories each and 21 grams of fat per serving, it’s a fat bomb – not that I have anything against that.

I finally ate a cup about 1:30 – not bad. Maybe a bit salty but otherwise OK. I enjoyed it. Pain in he ass calculating the nutrients, though.

Shortly after I had some coconut flakes in coconut milk with a bit of EZ-Sweetz just as an experiment. I warmed it up in the microwave and with a little work, might be an acceptable cereal substitute – but I at it for the wrong reasons. I was spending too much time looking at recipes and ate because of them – not hunger.

It got worse from here.

I went shopping with my younger daughter for lunches and snacks for the week. She asked for bagels and I said OK. Dad got himself some diet Coke as a decadent treat – even with aspartame in it, which can stall a low carb diet, how much harm can it do?

At home I had my soda – and it did not satisfy. At least I wasn’t going to drink the whole 6-pack.

It was early evening and my hunger was pretty much under control. The pork belly concoction kept me full for hours and I had been drinking water. I had bought pickles and decided on an old comfort food – pickles with mayo and cheese. I had 2 pickle halves with cheese and mayo, paused to have a glass of water, then had another.

I would have been fine except my daughter sat on my lap as she was eating a toasted bagel with cream cheese.

She offered me a bite and I – merely curious as to the quality of the bagel she bought compared to the authentic NYC bagels I grew up with as a kid living in the suburbs of the city in New Jersey, took a small bite.

Hmm…not a real bagel, of course, but an acceptable texture and flavor. 

Of course this was done simply for the sake of acquiring knowledge – nothing more.

So if that was the case, why did I have one half slathered in cream cheese – then follow it up with another slathered in butter?

It was over before I knew it. Charlie Brown thought he would kick the football Lucy held but ended up on the ground on his back once again – looking like an ass because once again, he fell for it.

This did me no good – I woke up multiple times needing Tums because of the indigestion.

It does seem obvious to me that 53 grams of carbs right before bed doesn’t make me feel well. It probably goes to follow that eating as much as I did right before bed isn’t all that great either.

Yeah – I know: Captain Obvious here reporting for duty, sir. So sue me. I can be fantastically stupid at times – and this was one of them.

While the day ended as a fail, it could have been worse – I could have been eating and drinking like I did before I started this attempt at a diet.

Calories: 2212
Net Carbs: 76 g
Protein: 62 g
Fat: 169 g

One other thing: based on a commenter’s recommendation I paid $2.99 for the Carb Manager iPhone app. While the interface is quirky and you apparently can’t build your own recipes in the app without a yearly subscription, it is certainly easier to use than Loseit! if you are following a low carb diet. I’ve used it for a day and it’s still too soon to tell if I will come to hate it more than Loseit! – but I don’t hate it more yet.