Yes, i took melatonin last night. I woke up slightly in the wee-small hours, but drifted right off again. Got somewhere around ten hours of good rest, making up for the two previous nights.
I woke up cheerful, serene and alert; the scale was down another half-pound. I was WICKED yesterday, and had a couple of cocktails (home made -- only significant sugar was in the ounce or two of Cointreau) with my pound of meat (over two meals), and my supper was a good-sized glass of home-made raw-milk kefir.
Since i had tired myself out on wednesday, patching plaster in my still-renovating living room (it was all the ladder-climbing), i took it easy yesterday and included a long hot bath. No walkies, only one or two trips to the basement and none to the attic.
Am i going to advocate this as a perfect formula for weight loss? HELL no!
Just because a sugar-containing increase in carbs for one day RESULTED in weight loss, doesn't suggest to me that yesterday's intake was optimal. It was just delicious and satisfying. If i repeated it, the scale would probably be up tomorrow.
In looking at the recent iniquitous studies that condemn red meat and egg yolks and all those foods WE have been improving our health with, paleo/low-carb authors are always decrying the confusing of correlation with causation. But ya know what i've noticed? They don't mind mere correlation at all, when results tell them something they want to hear. Chairs kill? Standing-desks are best? People who walk or bike to work are thinner? I don't think anyone has even done a randomized, controlled study on those things. Why are they considered gospel? Because it fits into people's belief systems.
Now, i'm not one to deride anecdotal evidence. In many cases -- like, when Drs. Atkins or Davis observe hundreds of patients improve health with the removal of sugar, wheat, vegetable oil, whatever from their diets -- THIS is powerful evidence and more likely to be true than a BigPharm trial that's rigged from the start. You just have to make sure that the people telling the anecdote are on the same page with you.
So today, i'm going to resist the temptation to repeat my good-resulting behavior of yesterday. My breakfast was a good-sized serving of Italian Almond Cream (an Atkins recipe -- if you've never tried it, you SHOULD -- delicious!) with my coffee. I think i'll have a steak for lunch/dinner, but no cocktail-hour today. Since i've had such good luck on weight this week, i won't anticipate the scale going down for several days.
That should correlate with long-term success.
Oh, I know. Confirmation bias. I think there really might be something to the eggs. After all Robb Wolf recommends ditching them for a time, for people who might be allergic. And I am certain that a vegan whole-foods diet really does help many people.
ReplyDeletesince a goodly number of people ARE sensitive to eggs, it's not a bad idea to include them amongst the things one reintroduces carefully after a strict elimination dier. i wonder if some people might also react badly to soy-fed chicken eggs. in addition, yolks might be tolerated when whites are not....
ReplyDelete:-) veg*n whole foods diets may beat the hell out of the things some people eat.... however, i don't think it's possible to remain healthy without at least dairy foods, for meat-abstainers.
Eggs were always the guilty pleasure that took me out of vegan-land. At one time, I did have a problem with eggs, and could never eat them alone. Then I realized that pretty much every food bothers me if I have been eating significant amounts of wheat within the prior 2-3 days. I was developing this longer and longer list of foods that bothered me, but never realized that it was wheat, probably because the clearance time for wheat was so much longer than for other foods. Now I can eat a ton of eggs, cooked in undrained fried bacon, with peppers, sour cream and all this other stuff I used to avoid.
ReplyDeletethat's a very good point -- some "disagreeable" foods don't show their bad side for awhile after ingestion, which makes them harder to identify as problems!
Delete