Monday, February 20, 2012

shades of Stefansson....

Even though i've been a "locarber" for years now, i seem to be following the classic pattern old Vilhjalmur described in his men:  they take to the fatty meat-eating enthusiastically enough, but soon have a lapse in appetite for a couple of days before regaining their relish.  I'm in that middle phase.  The first day i easily ate and drank the quantities prescribed, but yesterday i had a heck of a time choking it all down! 

I was tempted to reduce the volume, and wondered if Donaldson's recommendation of half-pound-beef-eating might have been the male version of the diet -- one case history he discussed was a stout young woman, whom he directed to eat two two-rib frenched lamb chops three times a day -- exactly how many ounces would that be?  Tempting to do exactly the same, but EXPENSIVE.  Other women cited DID have comparable prescriptions to that of the men, though....

Soldiering on, i managed to consume 1/2 pound of home-made pork sausage for breakfast, another patty of my home-ground chuck/liver/parsley/green-peppercorn burger, and an appropriate amount of the over-large KC strip steak, each meal accompanied by a short cup of coffee, interspersed with the six total cups of water.  Damn, i felt my stomach was overloaded all day!

This morning i woke with a reasonable appetite and the scale a pound lower than yesterday.  The before-breakfast exercise took a goodly amount of my appetite away, though, and i had little enthusiasm for the half-pound of leftover pot roast i ate.  Stuffed again!  ...On the other hand, it beats hell out of my low-fat days, when my stomach could be overloaded but my satisfaction level inadequate.

Allergy symptoms are lower than they were yesterday, but not gone.  I'll be sticking to ruminant meat today (i have goat and lamb in my freezer as well as beef), and if i decide to sneak in a little starch at supper, it'll be white rice.  I predict less sinus inflammation tomorrow.

This remains an interesting experiment!  Like the Atkins "fat fast," i think it makes for a reasonable method of getting past a frustrating plateau. 

Bette Davis (LOVE that actress...) once said, "Getting old is not for sissies."  I'll go a step further and say, losing weight WHILE you're getting old isn't for the weak, either!

2 comments:

  1. Interesting, Tess!

    How do you transition once the plateau is broken? My guess is, gradually!

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  2. :-) your guess is as good as mine!

    since Donaldson didn't spell things out as we're accustomed to seeing in diet books, i can only take the hints he gave a couple of his patients.... it LOOKS as though he chose what he considered a reasonable weight for each, then when they reached it, he allowed them a couple more items per meal, and if their weights went up, he had them reduce an additional 5 pounds and try it again -- if they stayed stable, that was the "right" weight, and they went on with four items per meal....

    he always told his formerly-obese patients that they could NEVER eat wheat and sugar again, and had his own list of things people really shouldn't eat anytime (with those two heading the list, of course). i think that is the shortcoming of programs like WW -- they never teach that certain foods simply spell T-R-O-U-B-L-E.

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