Too tired to think about low carb

Today's weigh-in: 222.4

Well, I'm down about 7 lbs since the beginning of the week.  What I've read about the ketogenic (low carb, high fat) diet is that the quick weight loss at the beginning is mostly water weight.  That means it's easy to gain back.  So I need to be really careful to continue the diet to ensure that my weight doesn't go back up.  I know from watching my hubby in his attempt, which has gone on about three weeks longer than mine has, is that after about two weeks the weight loss will slow down.  I'm hoping that, by that time, I can be down about 20 lbs.  I think that will make a big difference, since I haven't even incorporated working out into the equation yet.

Tomorrow is the first day of November, and I think I'll try to do one of those workout "challenges" that I see on Pinterest all the time.  Maybe that will keep me from bogging down in the diet.

But I just have no energy at all.  I don't know what it is; I guess it could just be my body wanting its carbs.  Hopefully this will get easier once my body gets a little more used to the diet.  Cross your fingers.

Do-Over Day 11- 1/11/10

Today's Weigh-in: 205.6

Well, I had lost two pounds, but then my father-in-law made goulash for dinner, and the next night we had pizza. While I haven't had to face my greatest nemesis (Mexican food, because there are no really good Mexican places in Billings, MT), I still haven't done a great job on eating less and exercising more. While I have hit the elliptical machine a few times, I haven't done it with the regularity, intensity, or duration I require to lose weight. I must continue to work on it.

I must also report that I have been off my birth control pills since December 27th. That would have been the day I would have started up the next round of 21. So I'm on Day 16 of possible fertility. I am not doing any tracking of my temperatures or anything like that. It could be that it will take time to "get all the birth control out of my system", so to speak, since I've been taking it regularly for 16 years. Or, I could get a huge surprise and miss my upcoming period. We'll just have to wait and see. If it takes months and months, then I might start charting and stuff, but for now, we're just rolling with it.

I did go ahead and start taking regular vitamins. I need to do a little more research before I commit to a particular brand of prenatal vitamins. I'm also going to look into a pregnancy diet to see if there is anything that is commonly recommended.

It's a new year...let's see what awaits!

Day 47 - 2/16/09

Weigh-in: 197.4

Well, this whole thing has been a total failure so far.  I have been unable to motivate myself to work out.  With only three weeks left before my Spring Break and the two trips I'll be taking then, it is unlikely that I will be able to lose significant weight by then.  But I can't give up.  If I don't do this, I'll never get to the point, health-wise, that I can have kids.  So I have to figure out a way to do this.

I took some measurements today in the hope that I can give myself more motivation and more ways to gauge my progress.

Upper arm--15 inches

Bust--46 inches

Chest--38 inches

Waist--39 inches

Belly--43 inches

Hips--48 inches

Upper thigh--27 inches

Calf--17 inches

I at least made a surprising amount of progress this past weekend, somehow.  I didn't think I ate particularly well--lots of pasta and bread--and I didn't get a whole lot of exercise other than walking a few blocks too and from my car.  But somehow I ended up two pounds lighter than when I left.  Not sure how that happened.  If I can duplicate that every four days, like this past weekend, I can still lose 12 lbs by the time I go kayaking.  

Let's see if I can get off my fat ass.

Day 34 - 2/3/09

Weigh-in: 198.4

Yeah, I know.  It's all the same.  To be expected.  I'm working on it.  The usual, you know.  But in the meantime, I thought the above cartoon summed it all up.

Day 27 - 1/27/09

Weigh-in: 199.4

I know; I'm a bad person.  I've been negligent in every way--not working out, not eating well, not posting anything.  Bad me.

But why report the massive amounts of failure?  

Anyway, I'm trying something new this week.  For the next few days, I'm cutting down to about 1200 calories, through strategic spreading out of snacks and meals, with heavy usage of SlimFast and Special K products.  Now, this is not a diet I would or should rely on for any length of time, as it does not include any vegetables, just a glass of fruit juice in the morning.  But I'm curious as to whether or not I can lose weight simply by cutting back the calories, and I haven't had time to figure out a better diet that includes vegetables.  Maybe next week.  

Day 18 - 1/18/09

Weigh-in: 198.8

Well, it's an improvement over yesterday, but I still have a long way to go.  And tomorrow's weigh-in probably won't be this good, with a day of beer and chili on the couch in front of the football games.  Oh well.

I have heard, off and on, people referring to "volumetrics".  I thought it was just a general concept, but apparently someone actually coined the phrase and wrote several books, with recipes, about it.  The concept is simple, though.  You want to fill up on large volume, low calorie foods.  Water, of course, is the prime example; it can make you feel full, but contains no calories at all.  A big pile of raw veggies might contain the same number of calories as two chocolate chip cookies, but you might still feel hungry after the cookies, while all the veggies fill you up.  It all makes sense.  And really, there isn't anything here that doesn't apply to most of the other common sense diets--eat more fruits and veggies, eat less sugar and fat, and drink lots of water.  

But what do you do when you still crave those stupid cookies?

On a different topic, I'm trying an experiment.  I mentioned before that I take blood pressure medication for hypertension.  Well, I need to refill the prescription.  But I decided to try going a few days without it before refilling it.  Since my ultimate goal is to drop the meds entirely, I need to know where I stand right now, before the weight loss.  So I plan to skip the blood pressure med for a couple days, and take my blood pressure at home using an automatic pressure cuff I got when the doctor first put me on the med.  I want to get a baseline for my blood pressure without the med.  That way, I can tell if I'm improving, by taking a few more days at the end of the next month to do the same thing.

Day 13 - 1/13/09

Weigh-in: 199.8

OK, so I didn't do a very good job yesterday.  I didn't go to the gym in the morning OR the afternoon, and my husband sweet-talked me (although he didn't have to try hard) into dinner at Outback Steakhouse.  I am a major carnivore, and I do my steak the way God intended: RARE.  Mooing.  Limping.  I want it to fight for its life on my plate.  So, after no working out and a dinner of red meat, a salad smothered in cheese and ranch (how can you make lettuce any better?), some of their brown bread (loves me some of them loaves), and a nice heap of garlic mashed potatoes, I should be pretty freakin' happy that my weight didn't jump back over 200 lbs.  I did make it to the gym this morning, and I'll probably just have a sandwich for dinner tonight, so hopefully I can undo whatever damage has been done.  Sad that it's only Tuesday and I already have this defeatist attitude about my weight for the week.  We'll see what the rest of the week will bring.

Anyway, I visited Baby Center today and looked up the topic of weight gain.  They suggested that a woman like me (read: fat) should really only gain no more than 15 lbs during pregnancy, since I'm already carrying more than I need.  According to their BMI scale, I am technically obese (thanks for the vote of confidence, people).  It sounds like I can use a lot of the reserves I already have for the baby's sake.  Which makes me wonder again, do you suppose I could actually LOSE weight by being pregnant?  I don't suppose I should try.  But the article did say that a pregnant woman should be more concerned with eating healthy than with gaining weight, since it's pretty much a given.  

I've done a little searching into a recommended diet for a pregnant woman.  Most of what I've found just generally suggests the usual--a diet high in fiber and lower in fat, and one that includes milk and milk products.  I wondered about the possibility of encouraging or creating a food allergy in a child based on the foods the mother eats prenatally, but so far everything I've seen suggests that it is unlikely that foods absorbed in utero might contribute to allergies, except possibly peanuts in families where peanut allergies exist.  I don't have any food allergies at all, and neither does my husband, so I'm hoping that means I really don't need to worry about food allergies.  Heck, the only allergy at all in our family is my husband's nasty case of hay fever.  Bummer for him.  

Day 12 - 1/12/09

Weigh-in: 199.4

Eh.  I guess I should've seen it coming--I didn't do a very good job sticking to my diet yesterday.  Based on the way I ate today, tomorrow's weigh-in won't be a picnic either.

Among the many other things I'm contemplating, thinking about pregnancy, I'm wondering what I'm supposed to eat, and what I'm not.  Several questions come to mind.

1) How much weight gain is "recommended"?  I've seen a few things that say you really aren't supposed to increase your caloric intake much, by about 100 calories per trimester.  Well, what about those of us who are already overeating?  Can I just stick with the amount I'm consuming?  Could that make me lose weight?  Wow.  That would be way cool.

2) What foods are recommended?  Is there a balance of carbs, fat, and fiber that a pregnant woman is supposed to consume?

3) And what about foods that AREN'T recommended?  Are preservatives really bad?  Could a woman actually give her child a food allergy based on what she consumed (or didn't consume)?

Also, I'm wondering about medications.  Certainly you shouldn't take much in the way of medicine, definitely with regards to prescriptions.  But what about over-the-counter meds like ibuprofen or aspirin?

These are some of the things I will be researching this week.  I hope to find some reliable information out there.