one week in, impressive progress

I woke early this morning, eager to enter my first week's results in the PPC's progress tracking tool.  ...Earlier than i should, in fact -- i sat up WAY too late last night, writing (which is also going well, but i won't go into it here).

I couldn't be more pleased with my progress.  I'm not eating a significant difference in number of calories, but a few staples of my ordinary diet have been pulled from under me by the strictness of this first phase of the Personal Paleo Code.  Generous amounts of heavy cream and butter, and phases of home-made yogurt use were customary with me.  Wine with meals, and the occasional not-sugary cocktail also fit into my idea of what the civilized bohemian should be drinking.  I even decided it would be wise to cut the nightshades.  Cheese, cream cheese, rice, stevia in my coffee, a couple of sucralose-sweetened sodas per week -- all banished.  About four and a half pounds of "ugly fat"* have also been banished.  In only one week.

Did i mention, i'm hypothyroid?  It's BLOODY hard for me to lose weight, though when i first started Atkins i had this same sort of success.  Trouble is, once you dump the worst dietary offenders (white flour, sugar, fruit juices) ... where do you go from there?  Eliminating seed oils, when i first discovered paleo, and balancing omegas 3 and 6 only take you so far.  Tweaking vitamin/mineral intakes, ditto.  Add to that, the fact that i'm now considered to be "of a certain age," and no matter what anyone tells you about it being natural to get dumpy now, it's still not a good thing to do, for many reasons.

One gets in a pattern of eating "permissible" low-carb/paleo foods.  Until and unless you steel yourself into a month of puritanical eating, you'll never know exactly which food is doing what to you.  I can tell you, IT'S WORTH IT.  It's a social pain-in-the-ass, and i'm lucky that my husband's business-trip was of long enough duration for me to be able to concentrate most of my attention on what i'm doing.  ...Wait, maybe THAT had something to do with the stress-snacking urge i suffered the other day.  Did the electrical outage distract me from my iron-backbone concentration?  If so, it goes to show what conditioned behavior patterns do to you -- one major distraction, and it's back down the slippery slide....

Well, i have another 3+ weeks before i can even THINK of adding in some of my deletions.  (Toward the end of that time, i have a major social event coming up; gotta consider it a challenge -- even a DARE -- and ramp up my "stubbornness response" to see it through.)  The heady progress i've made this week won't last, i'm not fostering delusions about that.  But the remaining signs of "physical degeneration" i've experienced, like my once-injured knee's tendency to arthritis pain, SHOULD also improve ... and i've yet to add in the REGULAR tabata sprints on the stationary bicycle.

"Ain't no stoppin' us now!"

*  Reference to a very old joke:  "wanna get rid of that ugly fat?  divorce him!"  Or "her", i guess.  :-)