Day 22: Omega-3 Effects

Today is mostly a “down” day, drinking my fruit juice concoction (2c fruit juice, 2T Braggs ACV, 1T honey, and water to fill container). I think we might do dinner somewhere tonight but that’s okay. We did a dinner at Applebee’s last night and I ordered the veggie pizza (it is listed as an appetizer on the menu, and is about the only thing other than french fries that a vegetarian can eat at the restaurant). Ate half. HALF! That’s it! HALF!!!

…I don’t know why it is so hard for me to mentally adjust to this. I just keep thinking that I will be more hungry than I am. I need a reset button for my brain.

Went for a short jog this morning (slept…through…alarm!!! ohno!!) and will be playing racquetball at 7pm. I am feeling really, really good doing my jogs, better than ever before in fact. And my sleep pattern seems to have changed since I started taking the fish oil caps (amost 2g a day of Omega-3 oils) too. I have always been able to sleep; in fact, that has been the problem: sleeping too much. Give me leave and I’ll sleep for 12+ hours. But not anymore, because I’m automatically waking up after about 8 hours. That, I assure you, is very peculiar for me. I also feel more rested. Hard to judge that objectively, of course, but it is my impression. So many people have talked about their sleep patterns becoming “normal” after upping their Omega-3 intake, I have to believe it is all related.

Right now it is near lunch time and I am not even hungry. The SW took off the edge of hunger that crept up on me around 11am; soon I’ll go dip into my juice/ACV concoction. I just have to say: I’m feeling really, really GOOD these days.

Day 21: Cookie? What Cookie?

Yesterday is the first day I did not post here at my SLD blog. I was at work then at college class and then staying up late working on our business plan; please forgive me!

It was not an exciting day anyway. A “down day” of mostly watered down fruit juice ended with ½ an apple and ½ cup of lima beans for dinner. Wooooweeee. The AS was in high gear so I was not very hungry, and even when I was, I was not craving anything. In fact Husband bought a whole bunch of yummy cheeses the other day and there they were in the fridge, waiting for me, but I was not waiting for them. Even after a full day of watered down fruit juice, all that sounded good was the apple with lima bean chaser.

Today I was physically very hungry by lunch, but upon eating my rice&beans mix, got full quickly. I was also “gifted” a bag of premium salt and vinegar potato chips left over from an executive luncheon. These are my absolutely favorite chips: kettle style with salt and vinegar flavors. Usually I can down a whole 1lb bag in a sitting and these small lunch size bags just annoy me (as my husband says, “just enough to p!ss me off!”). Today, I ate half the small bag and threw the rest away! Yes, again I threw food away. I mean, total craziness.

I was also gifted a large (humongous!) cookie from the same lunch. It looks good, but I have yet to touch it. Here, my habits are in hard battle with my new feeling of satiety. I’m full, stuffed even, from my 1 ½ cup of rice&beans and the ½ bag of chips. Really, really full – I swear! But mmmmmm I do luv me thoz cookeez. It calls me. Somehow I cannot bring myself to write the words “I will not eat it” even though, at this rate, I won’t. Some part of my twisted mind feels obligated to eat it (“It’s a gift! It’s a cookie! What’s the matter with you?!?”) yet my body is feeling like Clint Eastwood (“Go ahead, punk…you’ll puke!”).

Well, I could just sneak the cookie back out into the “freebie” box in the kitchen area. The gifter need not know that the giftee (me) passed the buck. I could do that.

This is life on SLD: Giving away the cookies you don’t want to eat!

p.s. the cookie is sealed in a plastic bag. It’s not like I’m drooling all over the cookie and then leaving it out on a tray for someone, here. I promise, the cookie is hermetically sealed in the bag!

Day Nineteen: Hot, Busy, and Full

Today’s weigh in was low! As in 203.6! I was not expecting that, and it was a very welcome surprise. I’m hot (as in the subject line) because I left work early to run all over town doing errands and it was Hell. No really, I mean like Dante’s Inferno, with a heat index of about 104 and a blazing sun firing like a laser through the windows on my car. By the time I got home at 5pm, I was splattered. I laid in bed with cold towel on my head for an hour. Seriously, right now in Florida, you can get heat stroke in your car. Bleaghhhhhh.

My art class at FSU has begun so my schedule is beginning to tighten in the vice. If all goes as planned, my masters program begins next week. As well, I have to work full time and Husband and I are opening our own, very labor intensive business. I cannot tell you how stressed I am by the anticipation of being whipped like a dead horse by these commitments. My free time is becoming very escapist-oriented, let me tell you. However, and to my surprise, stress induced eating does not seem to be a coping mechanism for me, for once.

I remember when my mother was dying, and people I talked to would often worry that I wasn’t taking care of myself or eating enough (I was the main caretaker for both of my parents; yes, it was horrible). The default assumption is that if you are worried and stressed and anxiety ridden, you lose your appetite. Riiiiiiiight. I just ate more. Food was the solace that I could not find under any other rock. I had no life of my own and was losing everything and everyone that mattered to me, and my response was to stuff myself full of something. Full never came.

Over the years that followed I fought that urge, and while it was often a losing battle at least I was aware of my actions and attempting to change my behaviors. Anyone who has battled emotional eating knows the futility of that statement, though, and the insanity it inspires.

But now, I’m practicing SLD while totally stressed out, and full has finally arrived. I ate well yesterday: beans and rice for lunch, 1/2 apple for snack, and sushi for dinner. I was satiated, and I did not run for snack food or chocolate or beer. I did watch too many episodes of Spaced on YouTube (I am SO buying that series on DVD!) but if that is the worst of it, I think I’ll be just fine. For a change.

Day Eighteen: Day Up Day Down? Maybe.

On the SLD Forum I have heard about the JUDDDD (Johnson’s Up Day Down Day Diet) and it rings with me. I was doing something similar with the MasterCleanse lemonade mix after I first did that fast for an extended period and it worked well for me: easy, simple, and effective. Except, not so simple, really: making the lemonade in the morning was a pain the butt. I got tired of the hassle and stopped the practice.

Finding out about JUDDDD makes me realize that the principle is sound, so application can vary. That is, I don’t have to use the MasterCleanse lemonade; all I have to do is keep my calorie intake at less than 1000 calories on those days. The SW takes up about 150+, plus 100 calories of fish oil capsules in the afternoon, so that leaves roughly 700 calories, which I can easily get from a watered down fruit juice. So. Hmmm. Might do that. Will be particularly easy now that FSU is in session to do it on school days, in which I leave for work at 7:30am and do not get home until 10pm at night.

Worth trying, I think.

Today is a juice day anyway, in recovery from Pizza Hell yesterday. Yikers. I fell into Hot Fuzz coma (I adore that movie, and watch it repeatedly…do I have a crush on Simon Pegg or Nick Frost? Dunno) and slept like a log. Got up this morning and went for my jog, which is encouraging. I’m back to trying to jog every day, and not use racquetball or rainy days as excuses not to. (I really do enjoy running, to be honest, and I think if I can get into doing regularly and with exertion I’ll get in excellent shape quickly. Well, that’s been the dream for years!) Drank my SW about 10am and later some watered down juice at 1pm; I did not purposely wait a long time before drinking the juice, it is just that the AS from the SW kicked in hard. I’ll take my fish oil caps after 3pm. Tomorrow I think I’ll weigh in. Somehow I suspect the scale hasn’t budged; my clothes do not feel looser and after yesterday I’m sure I gained three pounds just from the pizza alone! Ugh.

Day Seventeen: Oy, the Pain…

Okay so I made a humongous mistake. Allow me to warn you: do NOT overeat while practicing SLD dosing!

I made two mistakes, actually: I did not eat when I was hungry, and when I finally did eat, I ate too much. I took my sugar water in the morning and later, around noon, husband and I set off to run errands. Now, I knew I was going to be home between 2-5 for a special program series on PBS so I figured we’d get pizza (special treat!) on the way back from the library (our last stop) and eat it at home while I watched my highly-anticipated show. Good plan. Only, I was really hungry by noon…but you see, since I am on SLD, it was a mere physical hunger and not a mental craving, therefore it was very easy to just ignore. “Oh, I’ll be eating soon!” I thought to myself. No problem. Now that in and of itself is kind of awesome, because before SLD, if I was hungry, my world stopped. No running errands or planning ahead or anything. Dead stop: eat, now! But that feeling was not present so I, being incredibly dumb about things like this, decided to ignore the signals my body was sending me and put off eating for later. Oh, the novelty! Oh, the stupidity!

We got the pizza as planned and I just attacked it. Ate three whole slices which is one slice less than I normally eat, and one slice more than I should have. Burrrrrp. I was a burping slug the rest of the day. We went to play racquetball at 6pm and I sucked, as in terribly terribly sucked. I was very mad but confused: what was wrong with me? Oncoming cold? Brain tumor? What? Then I realized that I felt sluggish and fuzzy: I could not track the ball and I could not anticipate my shots. I was in carb crash! Three hours later! I could not eat a dinner, either. Three slices of pizza in the afternoon and, right before bed, a handful of yogurt covered raisins (my husband’s desert of choice, the weirdo): that was my entire day.

This is an important lesson for me. I am so used to being on a “diet” and forcing my body to conform to my food choices that I have forgotten how to listen to what my body is telling me. If I had grabbed an apple on the way out the door to run errands, I would have curbed the physical hunger pangs and then, later, not overeaten. I might have ended up eating three pieces of pizza over the course of the day, but they likely would have been spread out (two for lunch, one for dinner, for instance) and not impacted my chemical balances the way they did when gobbled up in one sitting.

Tomorrow, Monday, I am going to do a fruit juice fast for the day. My body needs a serious break from the pounding I gave it this weekend.

Of course, it is amazing to think of only three slices of pizza as a “pounding”!!!

Day Sixteen: Wherein I Really Do Try to Overeat

This morning I got up and went for a short run, then fixed one of my everything-but-the-kitchen-sink protein shakes. After that, I promptly went back to bed. Well c’mon, it’s Saturday! Anyway I did get up in time to drink my SW at the appointed time. Thirty minutes later, husband came in bearing breakfast (okay, peanut butter on bread…we are confirmed bachelors, despite being married for many years, so our pantry is usually quite bare). How can you say no to an adorable husband bearing peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast? I at least said, “later” so had to sit around with my sandwich next to me for 30+ minutes. Hell.

Well I ate the sandwiches even though the AS was in high gear. I’m a people pleaser, I will not say “no” if I think it will hurt your feelings. Harumph.

Later we went to our favorite Mexican joint for dinner and I did feel hungry by then, so I really really tried to stuff myself. No, really, I did! But I could not finish the plate. In what is becoming routine, I ordered half of what I used to order before SLD, and I still could not finish it. My “I’m stuffed!” meter has changed and it throws me off considerably. All for the better, of course.

I do not plan on weighing this weekend as weekends are my “free” time, where I get to have a beer or some wine and OH GHODS YES chocolate! Mmm. I don’t purposefully plan to overeat on the weekends, I just allow myself to have the goodies I really want all week but don’t let myself have. So with the PB sandwiches and the chocolate and two glasses of wine, I’ve definately gone over my ideal caloric intake.

Aw, WTH. Life without wine and chocolate isn’t really living, after all.

Day Fifteen: Lessons to be Learned

Interesting development, which I’ve decided to write about based on Seth’s post about the flavor/smell relation. He discussed a study done with (what else?) rats about the relation of a stimulus associated with eating and feeding/weight gain, which was positive. We knew this before the rats, though, because Disney did it first by wafting the smell of fresh baked cookies down Main Street in the Magic Kingdom in order to get people to buy food. Anything we associate with eating is a trigger and so be it a smell or (if you are a rat) 30 minutes of light you will eat. Thus begins the cycle – eat, hunger, eat, hunger – and thus fulfills the prophecy of weight gain.

This was a particularly interesting post for me because recently I screwed up a morning’s dosage of flavorless calories by, 15 minutes later, getting in my car, opening my purse, and applying my favorite mint-flavored lip balm. Flavored being the key word here. When I realized what I had done, I paid attention, and yes, I did get hungrier more quickly than I normally do on SLD.

I began to suspect I doing this more often than I realized. How much do I use flavored/scented girly stuff? Well, let me tell you: a lot. In the shower; after a shower; as soon as I get to work; after I wash my hands (i.e. bathroom breaks); on the way home from work; when I get home from work; before bed. This includes body washes, lotions, hand crèmes, body oil and lip balm. And if you have not paid attention lately at the Body Shop or Bath Works or Victoria’s Secret: food glorious food! Everything from body scrubs to lipsticks have wondrous, delicious ingredients: vanilla, strawberry, caramel, mango, peach, melon, mint, sugar-spice, and even chocolate!

I wondered if I was just being paranoid about it – “right, spiced fig body spray will make me gain weight! Id’jut.” – but Seth’s post makes me realize my concerns are legitimate. I’m going to have to watch what I slather on in the 2-hour window from now on.

If you are a manly man, this will mean nothing to you. But if you are a lady, a gal, a lipstick lesbian, a metrosexual, or a flaming drag queen, then this is important: associating a food smell (“vanilla-peach spiced rum brulee” hand lotion, for instance) with flavorless calories is the same thing as eating!

As a quick wrap up of yesterday: I hardly ate a thing. “Dinner” was two peanut butter spoons and three crackers. Of course I also had a full body massage after work (ooooohhhhhh!!! aaaahhhhhh!!!!!) so I was catatonic for the rest of the evening anyway! I did realize that I need to be more structured in my flavorless calorie dosages (as I noted at my SLD page on the SLD Forum), though. So today that’s what I’m doing: stick with what I know, and do it at a time that I can keep consistent for a week. I took my old standby, SW, at around 10am and will try three oil capsules in the late afternoon (two fish oil and one multi vit. in an olive oil base). I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that I will report regularly on my results! Lunch was out with a co-worker, usually a “day pass” for me to eat a lot of junk, but no. The AS was in full swing so I ordered a “veggie cobb” salad (which was the only thing that really looked good: fresh broccoli! Cauliflower! Tomatoes and lettuce! Yum!) at Crispers, ate half of it, and got a to-go box for the rest.

Who is this person and what have you done with KimBoo???

Bonus Post

This is adopted from a post I made in my LiveJournal blog earlier this year. I think it is an interesting comment and as I was trolling through my links I thought it would be a perfect piece to repost here.

I’m “fat obsessed” and I am also bothered by the fact that I am. I try to be body-positive and healthy while nursing a deep-seated self-loathing; just call me Eve?

I was sitting on my bed last night and I saw my reflection in the mirror. Most of my overweight-ness is abdominal (the worst sort for health reasons, naturally) and all I saw was the tire of fat around my middle. Funny how perfectly that description fits: my fat fits just like a tire around me. Sure, my arms and thighs are a bit thick, but hardly at all in comparison to the middle. Just looking at myself in the mirror I became despondant and angry: lookit fat girl, isn’t she ugly?

The interesting part of this is that today, I feel good about myself. I think I look nice in the outfit I am wearing for work and I thought my face rather pretty when I was putting on the makeup. I still feel fat but hey, my proportions aren’t so bad. I’m a good looking woman. Go, me!

I think it is scary how this mood swings. I wish I could always stay in the “positive self” mode; it is more fun and I think healthier. Ahhh, but not to be for now, if not forever. One reason I stopped weighing myself so long ago was that I was tired of my mood being dictated by a number on the scale. It was exhausting to swing back and forth between bliss and loathing for such a foolish reason. I still do it, as this very post attests, but to less extremes. I suppose that is worth something.

Here is the final, painful twist to all of this: I found an old photo of myself at around eight or nineyears old. I was at some school function, and I was thin as a rail. I remember that event, actually, and I remember thinking how fat I was and how tight my clothes were and how everyone was probably commenting on my obvious ugliness. In looking at the photo now, I think I was rather stunning as a girl, and for damn sure was thin. I threw that beauty away because of my weight-obsessed self-hate. What a shame.

Am I doing the same thing now, I wonder?

Day Fifteen: Weigh In

This morning’s weigh in was honestly disappointing: 205.2. I know that I am eating far fewer calories than I used (and I suspect I’m in ketosis) to so I am wondering what is going on. I am exercising more so it might be that muscle gain is throwing off the results. Possible. Of course I am exercising more so that should also positively impact my metabolism. wtf? Two weeks into SLD and I’ve lost 1.8 pounds, which I can’t even be sure is true because I started right before my TOM, so I could just be down to my normal, not-TOM weight. I don’t know. I don’t notice my clothes fitting differently but…well I suppose I should start measuring. Bah. I hate measuring. For that matter, I hate getting on the scale!

I’m a lot less judgemental of myself than I used to be, so weighing and measuring doesn’t terrify me anymore. Still, old habits die hard (or live free!…sorry, sorry…) and I fight off feelings of inadequacy every time I see high numbers. Of course if my weight drops by a pound tomorrow morning I will be on cloud-nine high. Knowing that, I can take my reactions with a grain of salt.

It could be that I am in just good enough shape and my metabolism is just out of whack enough to make losing a very slow process for me. Of course I wrote earlier that even if I don’t lose any weight, I’m sticking to SLD because it is creating a healthier lifestyle, and I mean it. Still, given the dramatic decrease in my calorie intake, I wonder that I am not losing more.

I guess the next two weeks will tell what is really going on. I don’t mind being in this for the long haul.

Day Fourteen: Stuffed Again!

Yesterday I finished out at a Mexican restaurant. I had not eaten any breakfast (normal for me) and ate a little over a cup of rice and cheese for lunch, so by dinner time I was righteously hungry. Went to our favorite Mexican dive and stuffed myself…on less than half than what I used to order. Ate one cheese quesadilla and a side of salad (with guacamole! Yum!) and snacked on the chips. Normally it would be two quesadillas, one enchilada, rice, beans, and all the chips I could stuff into my face. In fact, between me and Husband, we did not even finish the bowl of chips they put out. We usually ask for refills (plural).

Now get this: Husband was driving and as we left he said the Magic Words of Wonder: “Dairy Queen?”

Me: “No way, I’m stuffed.”

Yes, folks, that was ME turning down a DQ Blizzard! That’s right, ME. Yes yes, you read it correctly: I said “no” to DQ!

You see the heavens parting over there? :::grin::::

Today I did the sugar water for morning, and then forgot to bring any oil to work. So I guess a small SW for afternoon too. I can see where people fall off the SLD wagon when trying to stick with the oil regimen: it’s damned inconvenient. But SW? Heck go down to the coffee pot stand in your office and steal 10 sugar packs – don’t feel bad, Joe in Accounting puts that much in his coffee every morning – and make your SW right there at work! Easy. I like that.

Today I ate my little (tiny!) bowl of rice and beans for lunch, with one slice of gouda cheese on the side. Full. But wait, there’s more! A section group meeting at work decided to order in food and left a lot of leftovers lying all over the group kitchen area. I’m talking about serious yum-yum, such as coleslaw and yeast rolls and corn on the cob. It smelled great, I’ll be honest about that, but I did not try any of it. Not the least bit tempted. Need I say, in the past I would have engorged myself on a double-lunch special with second helpings. I just feel so relieved not to be a slave to those outrageous cravings!

Side Effect Note: One thing I have not seen on the SLD boards, except for a few passing comments, is tongue rot. I have the absolutely worst taste in my mouth after the dosages, both SW and oil. It tastes like iron, nearly as if my tongue is leaking iron. I cannot for the life of me understand it, and I think it is a recent development. I sure don’t remember tongue rot when I started, anyway. Sometimes it will go away when I eat, but sometimes not. My diet has not changed considerably (just the portion sizes!) so I have to think it has something to do with the dosages. But what? Mystery. Yucky, annoying mystery.