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I got Dr. and Dr. Eades’s new book a while back, The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle: The Simple Plan to Flatten Your Belly Fast! . With my recent experiences it’s becoming plain to me that a shake-driven plan might work better for me in the first couple of weeks. I’ll dirty fewer dishes and have to plan fewer meals. Works for me.
So I was hunting around for a whey protein I could live with. I found this: EAS Dietary Supplement, 100% Whey Protein 32 oz (2 lb) 0.9 kg
Netrition had a decent price on it, and I may go back to them later if I have to. But I found it on sale at Target for between $18 and $19. For some reason, it’s on clearance. I’m sad. But after payday I may go back and grab whatever they might have left.
I tried an experimental vanilla and caramel (sugar-free Toriani’s) shake last night, which was too sweet with 2 tbsp of the syrup so I tried the chocolate today with one. Works great. It is not high-end chocolate or even Hershey’s but it works fine for me. The vanilla is pretty yummy. One of the shake variation recipes calls for frozen berries and I bet the vanilla would kick. ass. with those.
Yeah, it’s fake food; yeah, there’s a little soy in it, but that’s the last ingredient in the list, which is pretty impressive for a protein powder. And no aspartame. I’m happy to note that at least with their whey protein, EAS is no longer drinking the NutraSweet Kool-Aid. (Let’s see how many trademarks I can abuse in one blog post!)
If you’re thinking of trying the 6-Week Cure, this protein powder meets the requirements of two of the ingredients in the shake. It has more than 15g protein per scoop, plus it has 2500mg of leucine per scoop, which is something else they want you to add to the shake. You’ll actually be getting more of it now than was originally called for. But if you’re a weak little noodle-arms like me, it’ll probably do you a bit of good. And it’s only for two weeks. Not too shabby.
No strawberry flavor, but strawberry flavor is easy to mess up. I can live without it.
Best part? The other adult in the house gets nasty headaches from sucralose. This stuff is ALL MINE. Muahahahaha!
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Note: No one asked me to do this review. I chose to do it because I like the product. I’m terrible at meeting deadlines anyway, so asking me to do a review for you might be kind of futile unless you don’t care when I get it done. I did, however, use Amazon affiliate links in this post.
Note the second: How many different ways can I say “works for me” in one post? Wow. I am a shitty writer.
I know, it’s a provocative thing to say. I hate healthy eating. Those four words carry so much meaning for so many people. (Read more…)
I am writing this on Thursday but I actually did the weigh-in on Wednesday so here you go. I didn’t get on my computer all day until yesterday evening when we were about to go to the library, and logged in then only so I could make sure nothing I had out was overdue.
248.5 | 244 | 140
The past couple of weeks have been awful. I need to just take a day or two and bear down hard on that kitchen. I am SO ANGRY about that. If Matt cooks, the unspoken implication is that I’m supposed to clean up. Which is fair. It makes things easier on everyone. But then, if I cook–and I really need to cook most nights if I’m low-carbing so I know what I’m getting–then I also have to clean up then too, because God knows he doesn’t lift a finger. You might recall me stating that while my workload has increased something like threefold since we moved into this house (I went from an apartment flat to a two-story house with a basement, so three floors in all), his has not. He’s not a hardass about it, but as he’s the one paying the bills, I don’t like to give him too much crap.
Still. It’s bullshit. If you’re the breadwinner in your household but you won’t even pick your socks up off the floor (true story–he doesn’t), there is something wrong with you. If you want a maid, suck it up and pay the other adult for their time and trouble. If you just want them to do their share, their share is NOT everything that doesn’t involve your paying job. Grow the fuck up. They are not getting paid to do your job, and in this economy it’s likely they can’t get their own, so give a little to get a lot, or do your own share.
(He does give me an allowance, but it works out most months to something like $500 a month. That’s not even minimum wage. Then, on top of that, he spends himself down to zero and guess who winds up buying groceries about half the time? Three guesses and the first two don’t count.)
This is what is really getting me right now, it’s twofold: one, it’s really hard to low-carb with anything but a salad if the kitchen’s a fucking disaster. Two, it’s really hard to low-carb when the other adult brings home snacks for the kiddo like rice crackers, especially when you like rice crackers a lot.
There are other problems, like me giving up too easily. Sort of. I’m not walking away from this. It’s a pothole in the road, not a detour and I have not turned around and gone home.
Doesn’t mean I’m not annoyed about the two-pound gain. My one consolation is that at least some of it may be water weight. I’ve had swelling in my hands and feet the past couple of days.
Meh. Back to the drawing board.
Can someone out there please explain to me what the hell it is with low-carb bloggers and global warming? I’ve been seeing this all over the place for the past year or so. Apparently, because The Establishment is wrong about healthy diets, it is also wrong about climate change, and furthermore anyone in government who panics about global warming is a dirty, dirty fascist out to destroy the Western way of life.
I guess, to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Too bad we’re all getting screwed.
One of the more prominent LC global warming denialists is Dr. Barry Groves, of Second Opinion in the UK. I’m not trying to pick on him, I actually love reading his dietary stuff, but I don’t feel like going round hunting down a bunch of anti-GW (global warming, not George W.–oh, if only! once more a classic case of misplaced ire!) statements from LC bloggers at 3 in the morning when I’m already in sleep deficit. I’ve been carbin’ again and OMFG does my body hate me. So, easy it is.
I don’t have a lot of time to get into his stuff right now and I probably shouldn’t get too far into it in the first place because it’s off-topic here. I just wanted to touch on a few things briefly. The section on his site about “the man-made global warming scam” is here if you want to read it.
Before I begin let me state that I am not a climate scientist. The extent of my knowledge comes from random reading over the years and an earth science class when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. It was then that I learned about the carbon cycle, something I don’t often hear mentioned by climate change denialists. And that’s being kind. I actually don’t think I’ve heard anything about it at all from them, but it’s possible I did and have forgotten.
Ignore the carbon cycle and as far as I’m concerned, you don’t have much else to tell me because you’re full of shit.
Be that as it may.
First off, Groves trumpets this part of his site as though it proves without a doubt that the idea of human-caused global warming is a scam. Then you get into the introductory paragraphs and find this gem:
I say ’scam’ because that is exactly what it appears to be to me.
Dude, if you’re going to call something a scam, you better have something more substantial to go on than what you think you’re seeing.
He links to a video of a documentary about scientists–I guess, anyway, as unlike with U.S. television documentaries they don’t apply an introductory caption with the person’s name and title–who do not agree that the science on climate change is settled. I didn’t have three-quarters of an hour to get into the video. I might later, I might not. I hate watching videos on my laptop because then my daughter whines to watch cartoons on YouTube. And, as previously stated, I’ve stayed up three hours too late.
Be that as it may, I got enough of the video to catch some “expert”(?) stating that the science on climate change is, in his words, “not complete.”
That pretty much did it for me right there. I admit I am not a scientist by trade, but anyone who tells you that ANY scientific discipline has “complete” data and has completely figured out everything that that discipline is supposed to study, should go into a one-person home-based business as a manure dispenser. They’re so full of it I fear they will burst at any second. At least this way they can do an end run around the bad economy, what with so many taking up gardening now…
Then you had the random arguments about how all this shit that the IPCC wants us to do is going to be “expensive” and might not even do any good. Oh my GOD, we might have to do something that costs MONEY if this global warming thing is real, y’all! Then again, these people tend to be upheld as heroes by folks who expect us all to take a similar position with health care. If it’s too expensive then you don’t get any, and if you die, too fucking bad. Just so long as you don’t dip into their bank account.
Then they’ll tell you, all outraged-like, that life sucks today because people have gotten too selfish and only care about their own desires, not about the good of society. (For instance, this mentality is frequently on display when conservatives speak out against gay marriage.) Laws-a-mussy. Fo’ shame.
That’s the best they can do?
They don’t have every single little bit of data yet?
Somebody got a (relative) few bits of information wrong?
It might (gasp!) cost money to fix the problem?
Oh, and we don’t know this is all a scam, we’re just guessing?
Wow.
Tell me something, Groves… and all the rest of you, too. How the fuck is anyone supposed to trust us about what constitutes a proper human diet (adjusted for regional and cultural differences, of course) if it comes out you guys are wrong about this one?
I mean, if you don’t care and this is your idea of how to solve the overpopulation problem… well, knock yourselves out, I guess.
But if you actually do care about people, and are horrified at my suggestion… well? What the hell am I supposed to think?
At minimum I don’t understand why the implication always is that we don’t have global warming so we can do whatever we want. That’s not working. Time to get back to the drawing board. At MINIMUM it makes no damn sense to burn up all our resources so there aren’t any for future generations. Surely you understand this concept; I hear people like you bitch all. the. time. about how Obama is Satan because he’s running up the deficit. You grasp the concept with money. It’s time to expand your intellectual reach to encompass other resources too.
Whether or not there’s global warming, we’re in a hell of a pickle. The sooner people like you get your heads out of your asses and start engaging in political discourse like you have a goddamn brain cell or two to rub together, the better off we all might be.
Just saying. Enjoy your steak. Which, by the way, I don’t believe it causes global warming either. But never mind.
My child is becoming quite the photographer. Amazing what you can get with those kid-resistant* Fisher-Price digicams.
It even comes with a special-effect Ugly Momma distortion setting.
No, seriously, I realized after eating on Wednesday that I’d forgotten to weigh in. I meant to do it today, but forgot again. So I am just not going to bother for the week. Check back next week and I might have something for ya. Might. Dunno.
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*There is no such damn thing as kid-proof. No matter what Dr. Phil might think.
 The good part of my weekend... knitting these little dudes I wrote this blog entry at my SparkPeople blog (link to my page is in the sidebar to your right):
I wonder when I am going to get it through my thick head that I can’t ever rest with this effort? There are no breaks. There is no laying down the baton and lounging under a tree for five minutes. There is no “gee I will get around to meal planning/cooking/cleaning the kitchen later.”
If I don’t stay on top of food planning and prep I will not get through this.
There’s another adult in the house, but he is the throw-it-together-and-see-what-sticks type of cook. I need to know what I’m eating for right now. I need to get the macronutrient ratios I’m aiming for, I need to see if I can get all my nutrition from my food and I need to make sure my carb count doesn’t go too high. (And I don’t have much wiggle room there. If I want my fat stores to continue to mobilize I *have* to stay below 100g and probably more like 30g to 40g. The years of soda and grains have taken their toll on me.)
He just about never cleans anything in the kitchen but he makes just as much mess as I do, and frequently more. That dishwasher could be *empty* and he wouldn’t put anything in it unless he was feeling magnanimous. On top of that he’s a much messier cook than I am, which just exacerbates the problem.
To be fair he works 8 hours a day. This here at home is my job. We’re not married, not even involved, but the economy is in the crapper, I don’t have that great of a job history, and this way we can both parent without the usual back-and-forth of split-up parents who are being reasonable about contact with their child. So we’re sort of in a “traditional” setup here–and that’s fine.
My grievance is that this is a much larger residence than I’m used to dealing with. There is more of EVERYTHING that I have to keep up with. He, however, has not seen a more than threefold increase in *his* work duties since we moved in together. So a little more help from him than I’m currently getting would be very welcome. Apparently, though, it is also too much to ask.
And me being mad about it isn’t going to help anything. Me getting depressed and giving up on cooking even for a few days isn’t doing me a favor. He’s not going to suddenly remember that it is helpful for him to clean up after himself, or that even taking his dishes from the living room to the kitchen after a meal (yes, we often eat in there–something else I want to change), would be helpful to me. He just doesn’t care. So I have to care.
And I can’t blink. I can’t stop. I can’t drop anything. Because otherwise I give up and order pizza.
OK, it was *one* pizza. But even one’s too much, if I don’t make the pizza here. Wheat crust vs. cauliflower/mozz crust… no contest, as far as what it does to me.
Back on track today… and I tell ya, I could feel a lot worse than I do. Not a total loss. Probably not a loss of *weight* either… but what can you do.
Not quit, that’s what I can do.
That was pretty much my weekend in a nutshell. I’m up early today, so it’s time to hit the kitchen. You don’t wanna know how bad it is.
248.5 | 242 | 140
Sorry for the blurry focus. It’s hard to tell in the LCD panel and I’m not gonna shoot it again.
Wow, I’m actually close to the 100-pound-overweight line now. Cool. This is still going way slow, but along with the not eating enough, I suspect I didn’t actually have that much water weight to lose the first week, in contrast with my previous experiences, so this is the actual fat loss now and I was way worse off than I had thought.
Or hell, I can come up with hypotheses all damn day. It gets boring. The number’s going down and as long as I’m healthy that’s all I really care about.
I suspect the scale’s gonna show very little progress tomorrow. I’m aggravated. In the past, I’ve dumped water weight pretty fast and then kept on losing. Now it’s maybe a pound a week. It’s not That Time Of The Month–I just had that, and my cycle seems to have settled in at around 32 days or so, after years of being highly irregular. (Ah, the wonders of retinol.)
The only diet change I’ve deliberately adopted for the specific purpose of weight loss is low-carbing. I remember using Slim-Fast shakes when I was married, back in the mid-90s, but I can’t say I was following a program per se. (And DAMN I would love to be at that weight again, even if it was still forty to fifty pounds over “normal.”) This is it, and I’ve tried LCing a few times, quitting each time. Conventional wisdom says if you keep yo-yoing like that, your body holds on to the weight more stubbornly with subsequent weight-loss attempts.
Well, conventional wisdom also says you have to starve and run yourself to death to lose weight, and we know what bullshit that is. Or, at least, I do. So I’m not exactly convinced.
(Read more…)
I have skipped this probably two weeks in a row and I’m sick of it. I’m so sick of it that although I’m writing this at 13 minutes past midnight, let’s pretend I’m actually writing it on Sunday, so I’m totally lying with the datestamp. Yes, I’m that OCD. Fuck it. Let’s roll.
I was going to take a photo of a lacto-paleo cheesecake I made “tonight” in honor of my child’s sperm donor’s recent birthday, but he cut into it before I could yell HangOnASecLemmeGetTheFuckinCamera. So you get kitties again instead, because I like pictures to go with my LinkWithin plugin. This is my cat Lundi getting mommy hugs. She likes to get up on the bathroom sink and then prop her paws on my chest and purr like crazy while I pet her.
OK, there’s the cute part, on with the bitching.
(Read more…)
248.5 | 243 | 140
I am fresh outta double-A batteries and my camera’s starving so you get kitty yoga instead.
Actually, thanks to the aforementioned camera issues (my cat Tabby up there is a pic from about a week or so ago), I wound up weighing three times. The first time I got 243.5, the second time with camera in hand at start of weighing it was 244 (who knew that little fucker weighed half a pound?), and the third time with nothing in hand, but wearing the same undies and socks as when I started, I got 243. I need all the encouragement I can get, so I’m taking the smallest number.
Plainly I don’t have half the carb tolerance I think I do. It’s back to strict for me; I’ll just have to figure out how this works in practice, and record my food intake more thoroughly, no matter how much I fucking hate doing it.
Sigh.
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Dana is a thirtysomething single mom and Southern transplant to Columbus, Ohio. For more information, visit her homepage.
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