back to "normal" -- whatever that is

:-)  At least, i'm back to an Atkins-level carb intake.  Yesterday, black coffee for breakfast, lunch a "Cuban chicken melt" with mushrooms on the side and decaf to drink, then a couple of glasses of red wine with the dish our family calls "fake stroganoff," a "paleo biscuit" and generously-buttered broccoli.  Today's menu will resemble the classic Strong Medicine regimen.

I still have more subcutaneous fat on my belly than i've had for months.  :-(  Tomorrow i MAY have guts enough to get on the bathroom scale, but i'm not promising anything.

What with all the vegetable matter i've been consuming this past week, i have less-happy intestines and gut-bugs than usual.  My allergies are much worse, too.  The vague aches in some muscle groups are back.  2012 has been eye-opening for me in how i've observed my body to perform on different foodstuffs!  The only things that don't have ANY downside are fatty ruminant meat and water ... just as Dr. Donaldson wrote half a century ago.

It's fun to break the rules for a short time -- a change is as good as a rest, you know -- but once you discover what your body will put up with to maintain a decent quality-of-living, to stray from it very long is just plain DUMB.  ... And for the record, i did NOT run out and try to buy a final box of Twinkies.  Those things are NASTY.

still metabolically flexible

Yesterday J and i took a road-trip with the kids.  After the carb-orgy the evening before, i was planning to fast till dinner, so had nothing but coffee-with-cream (everyone else had lunch before leaving the house).  We took off across Houston to visit the farm of a friend of my husband's, where we'd been invited to go see the animals.

See the animals we did!  They have hundreds of donkeys of every size (mostly rescues), a number of horses and a handful of mules.  Ever see a Percheron?  It's a draft breed originating in France, not quite as big as a Clydesdale -- beautiful, intelligent horses.  The children liked the ponies, miniature horses, and standard and miniature donkeys best, being more their size.  The "mammoth" donkeys, i mistook for mules!  The kids fed the "equine collection" with gingersnaps provided by our host.  Two baby donkeys, too young for the cookies, were the stars of the show.  The finale was a visit to a young Standardbred horse they had just rehabbed from a tendon injury -- a gorgeous creature who was enjoying his newfound health by frisking around his paddock, playing with his "jolly ball" and kicking up his heels.

We stayed longer than i would have expected, and there was a 1 1/2 hour drive back before we got our dinner.  I was ravenous when we entered our favorite neighborhood restaurant ... but i hadn't been particularly hungry during the day.

It's a pleasant surprise to me that having once become keto-adapted, i seem to retain metabolic flexibility even after "overdoing" holiday carbohydrate foods.  I certainly retain carbohydrate sensitivity!  Don't get me wrong -- my diet has still been low-carb compared to the SAD -- just high-carb for ME.  I guess that, once the fat-digesting and -mobilizing enzymes and such are established, they'd have to be neglected for a time in order to not click back on as needed.

The biggest danger of reintroducing more carbs to the diet, in someone like me, is that they ARE yummy.  And UBIQUITOUS.  Let yourself have a few blue-corn chips (and i did), and the immediate ill-effects are ... not perceived.  So they didn't hurt, right?  WRONG.  You let your muscles burn glucose, and stored some expeller-pressed sunflower oil.  When the latter comes out to be burnt it doesn't flip the switch back to make those muscles insulin-resistant, so they want to burn more glucose.  Time to nip it in the bud.

No more cheat-foods for me.  In fact, i have a new real-food, portable, low-carb recipe find (thank you, Gina!) for my recipe page....

watching commercials again....

Buy the capsules that "scientists discovered" and it will melt your fat away with no changes in your lifestyle -- it's "clinically proven"!!!  ...How can people still fall for these lines?  Or are they taking advantage of a new generation of overweight people who neither have any experience themselves, nor are willing to listen to the experience of others?

If leanness, or a healthy liver, heart and brain are important to you -- i'm sorry to break this to you -- you're going to HAVE to make diet and lifestyle changes!  It CAN be quick and "easy" but you're going to have to make sacrifices in the realm of what you're allowed to consume.

END OF STORY

ground lost

Yeah, i've been "bad."  I can FEEL the subcutaneous fat gain.  I feel like a blimp.

Today i'm going to be very abstemious, in both carbs and alcohol.  Tomorrow i'm going to be "good," and on the weekdays "perfect" (the Strong Medicine regimen), because i've got a living-history event next weekend -- no time to waste.

The good news is, "fat" for me now is "lean" compared to where i was last year.  :-)

thankful

I hate being predictable, and it's even worse to be banal ... but i have to say that i AM indeed grateful for all the good things life has given me.

My family isn't perfect, but it's damned good, in my humble opinion.  Even the in-laws!  ;-)

My country has significant faults, but it could still be a lot worse.

My health and physicality are far from being what i'd LIKE, but compared with what some people have to bear, i'm fortunate.

My situation is more than fortunate.  I have people who care about me, and i have people to care about.  And animals.

They say that people who feel gratitude benefit in some significant ways.  I hope that correlation and causation are related, here.  Happy Thanksgiving, or Harvest Home, or whatever traditional autumn holiday you prefer!

when i start to doubt myself...

Sometimes, going on the road inhibits blogging inspiration, and sometimes provides me grist for my mill....

This time, my husband is with me, so the dynamics are very different.  When I drive i listen to music, but HE prefers NPR, and my general rule is that the driver gets to choose.  Therefore, i've been listening to some radio shows that i ordinarily would not.

Sometimes (also) i feel like i'm pretty dumb.  When i have to read one of Peter's sentences -- or a whole post -- several times before i get a faint glimmer of understanding ... it's EASY to feel intellectually inferior.

But i should know better.

Any time i feel old and fat and ugly, all i have to do to feel better is go to the mall and look around me.  Any time i feel slow and stupid, i now know that all i have to do is turn on the radio.  EVEN NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO.  (Jeeze, i could probably become an instant Einstein, just by tuning into an AM talk-radio station....)

Dedicating 30 minutes or an hour to discussing something outrageously WITHOUT IMPORT seems to me to be the ultimate waste of time, energy, and money.  I've heard more dumb-ass comments and questions over the last two hours than over the last two weeks!  (I was about to say "two months" ... then i remembered the electioneering season.)

Right now there's an author being interviewed about his book that talks about lifestyles favoring longevity.  To us, OLD NEWS.  And can you spell, C-O-N-F-O-U-N-D-I-N-G V-A-R-I-A-B-L-E-S?  grrrrrr....  The interviewer asked about maintaining mental function, avoiding dementia, and he started talking about herbal teas*!  @#$%&%$#@.....

Before this show began, there was one talking about shopping during "thanksgiving weekend" -- one man thought businesses SHOULD NOT BE OPEN, even if their staffs want and need to work, because "thanksgiving is the only time extended families can get together and spend time with each other."  ONLY time?  Honesttogod, can these people not realize that their opinions are completely illogical?  And does the concept of "live and let live" not have the potential to simplify things considerably?

I become disgusted that stirring up controversy over something that's totally immaterial trumps truthful simplicity.  Why do people worry about what everybody else is doing, if they're happy and not imposing on others?  As far as Mr. Longevity is concerned -- the science is out there, but he can't be bothered.  I called my husband's attention to that fact, and i have to pass along his comment:

"But ... but ... that's BORING!  THIS sells books!" (He's a Taurus.)

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*  "AND," J pointed out, "this guy has great credentials -- he works for National Geographic."  <groan>  Fortunately, you're hearing the warped sense of humor he enjoys.  If these comments were strictly serious, i wouldn't be able to live with him!

what i'd LIKE to see in the Times

"HEART-HEALTHY" POLYUNSATURATES KEEP YOU FROM BURNING YOUR OWN FAT AS FUEL, AND MAKE YOU HUNGRIER!*

HIGH CARBOHYDRATE INTAKE SETS OFF A CHAIN-REACTION THAT LEADS TO INSULIN RESISTANCE IN THE LIVER!**

Of course, if these (and other) basic truths hit the mainstream media, what would they print tomorrow?  Somehow, it seems to me that perpetuating controversy and half-truths feeds public appetite (word choice deliberate) for more and more articles that ... don't help.

It's like soap operas and dramatic "comic" strips:  they're all about cliffhangers that promise that if you keep coming back for more, you'll eventually get mental/emotional satisfaction.  Like 900-number psychics, who are free for the first five minutes, and you hope that five MORE minutes will reveal something valuable.  

Nobody wants to say that to improve your health (and incidentally lower your weight) you'll have to give up something you like FOREVER, for all intents and purposes.  That's depressing and bleak to a lot of people, and it will drive them away from a dietary program or a newspaper/magazine that announces it.  Never mind that it's TRUE.  No, diet books adopt a cheery, optimistic you-can-do-it-it's-EASY tone, promises of steady loss, and implications that in maintenance you can enjoy again all those goodies that got you in trouble in the first place.  SURE you can enjoy them again -- about once a month, not every day.

I'd like to see a headline that says MEDICAL SCIENCE CAN'T SAVE YOU FROM A BAD DIET with the follow-up article HEALTH OR HEDONISM -- YOU CHOOSE.  Now, we in this little blog-circle of ours know that our real-food diets, be they very-low-carb or moderate, are NOT pleasureless, even though they seem spartan to "outsiders."  But we DO, for the sake of our well-being, forgo a lot of foods we enjoy because our bodies punish us if we consume them.  We make sacrifices of convenience and give ourselves reputations of being weird, which tends to set us apart.  It's a good thing most of us are independent-minded in the first place!

But no mainstream publication wants to print these things.  They're not Harvard-approved or ADA-recommended.  And they're off-putting!  The media want their customers to feel GOOD and MOTIVATED, even THOUGHTFUL, but not hopeless, discouraged or daunted.  Consumers mustn't be convinced that power is in their own hands to improve their lives, although to do so they're gonna have to do things they'd rather not.  People are supposed to go to their doctors regularly, and take their expert dietary advice.  Doesn't matter that most doctors know diddly-squat about nutrition.

It's more appealing for periodicals to print articles about individuals in the public eye who have health and weight problems -- that makes John and Marsha, sitting there reading on their 50 excess pounds, feel more like everyone else, and also UNDERSTOOD.  Printing stories about how "dangerous" very-low-carb programs are make people feel better about not WANTING to change their diets.  Gushing about the superfood-du-jour today allows them to write about the superfood-de-demain tomorrow.

_____

*  http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/11/protons-physiological-insulin-resistance.html

**  http://kindkehealthnotes.blogspot.com/2012/11/high-carbohydrate-diets-induce-hepatic.html