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.
My hypothesis is that I’m simply not eating enough. What a bizarre problem to have on a weight-loss program, right? We’re supposed to eat less, not more, right? Well, other than drinking liquid calories, one hallmark of my life as an obese person is I haven’t been much of an eater. I’d go most of the day with next to nothing and then eat a big dinner, and still (by my estimate) not get 2000 calories a day unless it was in the soda. And there’s no nutrition in soda. Just sugar*.
I’m not much better about it now, especially in the past couple of weeks. When I first start LCing I’m going like gangbusters, trying to get at least two squares a day and recording everything I eat. After a while I get bored and go back to my bad habits. I know intermittent fasting is supposed to be healthy, but a part of IF is eating that huge meal during your permitted eating time. Even Muslims who observe Ramadan go gangbusters on the iftar meal at sunset. I don’t do that. I just grab a regular-sized meal and as soon as my body isn’t going “HelLO I need FOOD here” anymore, I quit eating.
The end result is that on days I bother tracking, I’m lucky to break 2000, and most days it’s more like the 1500-1800 calorie range, and more like 1200 if I’m feeling particularly unambitious.
It’s not like it makes a difference. I’m still in ketosis, which means my body is still getting calories even if I am not eating them. (Realizing that made me understand just how stupid conventional calorie theory is. It never takes calories from burned fat into account, among other flaws.) Eating 1500 calories a day doesn’t mean I’m only getting 1500 calories a day. It just means I’m only counting 1500 calories a day. What calories my body might be getting from fatty acids and ketones is anyone’s guess.
But as I’m skipping grain foods for the most part, the foods I get are nutritionally dense. Calorie-burning is all well and good but if I’m not eating enough of the nutritionally dense stuff, that means I’m not getting the nutrients in that food. Calories are not nutrients, after all. Vitamins and minerals, on the other hand, are.
I drink an Emergen-C packet in a glass of water most days to satisfy my desire for sweet drinks. But that only covers some water-solubles for the most part. (Since I started doing this I no longer crave sushi; Emergen-C has 500% of the daily requirement for vitamin B6, of which salmon is an important source. Guess which raw fish is my favorite?) I need the whole gamut, not just a few vitamins, and there are undoubtedly other nutritional factors in whole food that science hasn’t isolated or understood yet. If I don’t eat the food I don’t get those either.
So I have a sneaking suspicion I might know what’s going on here. I think my weight loss will go much better if I eat more regularly, and eat enough. The trick is getting to that point. My lazy eating habits have been going on for most of my life. That’s a lot of inertia to work against. It remains to be seen whether I’m up to the task.
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*I appreciate that the source of sugar has some importance, but if you look at the actual proportions of fructose to glucose in both high-fructose corn syrup and cane sugar (beet sugar is something else again and can potentially come from GMO sources, as HFCS also can), they’re virtually the same. Anyone who tells you sugar is “healthier” for you than corn syrup is fucking lazy and hasn’t bothered to do what little research is needed to know otherwise.
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