13 Weeks: Week Five — In Which We Slog
In Our Last Episode: Our Hero – having dived into a 13 Week Experiment with a high-protein, high-fat, low carb di… eating plan inspired by Gary Taubes, and high-intensity training inspired by Tabata Izumi’s Tabata Protocol and the high intensity weight-lifting described in The Power of Ten and Body by Science — was confronted by the Thanksgiving Monster on the Weight-Loss Plateau. Now, we find him crossing the Slough of Despond pursued by ghosts from his past and burdened by excessive baggage.
Yeah, I’m not having as good a time.
It’s predictable: any time you do something like this, there’s initial excitement and enthusiasm, but eventually you’re in the middle of it and the excitement abates. This week the excitement has definitely abated. A lot of that has to do with things outside of the experiment itself: as we said in grad school, life is something that happens when you’re just trying to do your damned research. I had a programming project with a hard deadline for a demo; it wasn’t working and I got stubborn, resulting in my working from 9:30AM on Wednesday to 11:30AM on Thursday — 26 hours straight. And I can tell you, I’m getting too old for this crap. Adding insult to injury, I’d hit 276 pounds on Wednesday morning, and was back up to 278 when I got home on Thursday, even though I’d actually not had much to eat over that 26 hours. I then had some unhappy news on another issue that was stressing me when I got to work on Friday morning.
By Friday afternoon I was not a happy man. (This, by the way, is a cliffhanger to remind you to follow to the next page.)
Then Saturday, I woke up with a cold. And I was constipated. I was beginning to feel like a Hee-Haw bit:
Yes, I watched Hee Haw. Whaddaya want, I grew up on a cattle ranch.
At a request on the 13 Weeks Facebook page, I took an “in progress” picture on Tuesday the 4th.
Compare that to a similarly posed “before” picture:
That’s pretty close to a 15 pound difference. Most everyone said they saw dramatic differences, and people in real life were saying it too. Me, not so much. Oh, I guess I see the difference, but in my current mood, the “in progress” picture is still a picture of a 276 pound fat guy instead of a 290 pound fat guy.
Honestly, I’ve never had a good ability to “see” myself. As a little boy, I had a bunch of the little mishaps that every little boy has, and as a result I had accumulated some scars on my face — under my chin and in my left eyebrow. When I was six or seven, my mother managed a couple of deep hits on me — first, she looked at me with my shirt off, running around the house, and yelled at me to put on a shirt, I was too fat, it was disgusting. Then she started talking about my facial scars, telling her friends how she’d decided to pay for my plastic surgery when I turned 18, but that after that I was on my own. Those are just examples, hardly the whole history, but the net effect is that I’ve never felt particularly good about the way I look, and I see myself as fat and ugly.
So this week, I felt bad about myself, I felt bad about the eating plan, I just plain felt bad. And now I’m in the middle of this whole process — the big losses of the first couple weeks are past; now it’s more like just day to day life. As sick as I felt after eating some wheat after Thanksgiving, I’m not tempted to go completely off the wagon, but with the cold and all what I really want is hot tea with honey and lemon and a large amount of rum, and then ice cream, and oatmeal with lots of sugar and cream.
Now is the time I’m glad I’m keeping records. I have a graph of my weekly weights, taken every Sunday morning.
Well, now, that’s a bit more reassuring, isn’t it? Definitely going down. In fact, since I’ve included the equation for the linear-best-fit line, we know how much: plateaus and all, even with the post-Thanksgiving bump, it’s still a pound every four days. Total loss from when I actually started avoiding carbs on 19 October is close to 25 pounds, which is getting close to the 10 percent loss that is said to provide significant health benefits. What’s more, I can extract just my daily glucose from the data, and while it’s got a pretty high variance — a subject I’m going to research more — it also has a clear trend:
That’s about 1 mg/dL a week, but the lows are getting very low, down close to normal.
So today’s lesson, once again, is the trend is your friend. And maybe I shouldn’t fret about things that happened 50 years ago.
Good summary of the sloggy week, I’d say. You still look great and your Mother (with all due respect) was wrong. Hope you feel better soon. Trends look good, we’re counting on you and chering you and each other on thru the interwebz.
Meters are only accurate to within 20%.
That’s a good point. one standard deviation of the glucose is about 9.8 — glucometer error explains it all.
Hey, hang in there!
You look great!
Not only that, but consider your body, the organs and tissues are breathing a sigh of relief because the insulin and inflammatory onslaught has stopped and they can re establish their healthy functioning.
And regarding the big C, before you reach for fiber read some of this site: http://www.fibermenace.com/. An alternative approach that is counterintuitive but works amazingly well for my family.
You did have a challenging week, but can you get back in touch with how good your body feels? How much worse it could have been if you had been fueling your bod with inferior (read: crappy) food.
Hope all goes better for you next week. You are to be congratulated for your efforts.
I get how those early childhood experiences can color your vision of yourself, but those days are long gone and you can change that negative vision of yourself. Try to see yourself through a new lens of where you are now and take in how great you’re really doing! The cold will pass and more important, the trend is on the down slope. Hang in there — you can do this!
Oh my gosh, I forgot all about Hee Haw. This week was sloggy for me too, although the trend is still definitely down. I keep remembering what my doc told me, “it is a chronic medical condition that I need to manage for life” (interesting how manage for life can be read two ways). And to think of myself as carb intolerant. Removing the judgement helps me not focus as much on the judgement that goes with “fat”. Hang in there.
How can you forget Hee Haw?
Dude, you lost a whole tire around your middle — it does look good! My admiration to you and hang in there!
I’m 64 and stand 6’3″, have been on the low carb thing since 3rd week of September. I went from 277 to 247 (as of today). I do not exercise, as I have zero will power in that regard. However, I have been faithful in sticking to this new life style. It is working but I do hate the fact that I am no longer able to eat the things that I love. No sugars & no flour. When I reach 220 I will add back some sugar and flour and see if I can balance it and maintain the 220lb goal I have set for myself.
I wish you all the best in your quest!
It’s great that you’re tracking stuff so closely, but remember that you’re playing the long game and it’s more about health than weight. Your body’s systems have had decades of abuse and it may take years to reverse what damage can be reversed. Stick to it and the pay off in health and mental outlook will amaze you.
Charlie,
Keep at it. You will eventually reach an equilibrium, a new normal, where you can’t imagine eating the way you did before.
What worked for me getting through the rough patches is experimenting with new foods and in particular, trying every brand to find the one that appeals the most.
Bacon for instance. There are dozens of brands and each one tastes a little different. Make a sub-goal to not have the same brand two times in a row and to try to work through every one you can find. It adds a little fun to the lifestyle change.
Butter is another to have fun with. Lots of different brands with different marketing….Organic, Irish, grassfed, European style, etc, etc. Some of the taste differences are amazing. Try different grocery stores, they all seems to stock some different specialties.
Cured meats, and salamis also. Amazing the different kinds to try, Italian, French, Spanish, etc, etc.
Experiment with new foods, also….even things that you may never have liked before. After never eating sardines in my life, I worked through over a dozen different brands in a month and happened upon one I just love. It has become a major food item in my diet now.
Good luck and best wishes. And thank you for your posts. Its inspiring to hear about your experiences and the frank honesty in which you describe them.
I just caught up with your effort thanks to an Instapundit link.
I went through a similar, successful fat loss effort 12 years ago.
My two cents on the big picture:
1. Diet is 80% of the deal, and you have that about right. The things that tripped me up were not getting enough water, not getting enough fiber,not getting enough omega 3s, and getting too much salt. Those four things tended to fall through the gaps in my diet planning. Getting your salt down below 2000mg/day is hard to do and worth the effort. If you do not know how much salt you are getting, it is likely too much.
2. When I did it, I walked as much as I could without injury and lifted weights daily on an upper/lower split. It worked. High intensity work, whether sprints or in the weight room, did not. I finally figured out that the high intensity stuff is for after you get into good shape. You use it to get in better shape, and to get the workout done in less time. It produced nothing but injuries for me until I figured out that I was not ready for it. If I had it to do over again, I would have added C2 rowing into the mix.
Keep up the good work.
Your still fat and ugly, but I’m proud you are finally doing something about it.
Gee, Mom, you died last January — how’d you get Internet access?
With a little bit of angel funding, she was given access through the cloud.
She’s probably using a tablet.
I can see a definite difference, Charlie. Don’t despair, I had a similar plateau before heading down again. It’s been about four (4) months, and I’m down over 50 pounds, though I had a “hitch” in the loss after about 20.
I stayed very-low-carb, but I also went with low-calorie along with it, and that did the trick. What I found is that even Taubes’s approach has its limitations, and you can’t totally ignore calories. He tacitly mentions this in his “WWGF” book, saying you should stop eating when full. I am also careful not to eat much after dinner, and definitely nothing after, say, 8:00pm, so my morning glucose reflects a true fasting state. As a result, my glucose has levelled off at 95-110, and my A1C went from 12.2(!!) to 6.2 in three months.
On a statistical note, you can install “Data Analysis” tools in Excel (I’m assuming you’re drawing your graphs and doing your stats that way), then do a more sophisiticated analysis to measure whether your downward trends are statistically significant. Just email me if you need a hand doing it or interpreting the results.
Thanks! I’d forgotten them; I was bashing about in R last night. I’m pretty sure the weight thing is statistically strong, I need to look more closely at the glucose. It turns out these glucometers aren’t very precise.
I agree the weight is statistically significant, but I’d be willing to bet the glucose isn’t. Like I said, I found that late-night snacking caused my fasting value to go up (as did eating beef jerky, which I had hoped would be my dietary salvation).
Tweaking sulphur amino acids in high fat diet is worth understanding. Lowering the % of methionine content is the place to start. Your physical (motor) coordination for the hard training regimen will not be impaired.
Restriction of methionine results in less % tri-glycerides (lipid, fat) in the liver, even though it does not alter free fatty acids (fat) the body circulates.
The adiponectin hormone levels go up, even as leptin & insulin (plus insulin-like growth factor-1) go down.
The liver maintains normal gluco-neo-genesis (internally made glucose), but fasting blood sugar levels & insulin resistance improve. Plus beta-oxidation (fat burn) genes upregulate several fold & cells shift more to burn fat (than internally made glucose). A change in the sheer number of beta-andrenergic receptors to facilitate fat oxidation & energy consumption occurs.
Counter-intuitively, although you will eat more the weight loss will be greater from restricting methionine. People are perplexed by how historically orientals ate so much carbohydrates yet were thin. The old asian diet was low in methionine & one of the side effects of low methionine is shorter stature – which used to be obvious when europeans stood next to asians.
Pay attention to this:
the sulphur amino acid cysteine counter-acts the above effects of methionine restriction. Idealists tout eggs as the ideal food & yet eggs are exceptionally high in cysteine. Cysteine promotes gluco-neo-genesis & is why many say eggs keep them full of energy. Blogs repeat eggs’ cysteine make for more internal anti-oxidant glutathione, but don’t realize excess glutathione is degraded internally & in that process generate byproducts of metabolism that themselves do not favor weight loss.
Point being that if going low carb & finding your own metabolism seems stuck then look beyond just mathematical % of fat & protein. Internet offers links to food levels of methionine & cysteine to orientate this for more foods.
Charlie,
I am going repeat what I said at the beginning of your journey, that is “moderate your protein intake” You are really shooting for a low-carb, moderate protein, high-fat diet. Read and re-read “The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance” by Phinney and Volek. Once you moderate you protein intake and increase your fat intake, I think you will find that you will start to feel better as you will be producing enough ketones to feed your brain. In the mean time you might want to consider taking some coconut oil or preferable MCT oil.
I started this process in the beginning of August and didn’t get back to feeling normal/good until almost the end of September.
Stay strong!
Peace
Joe E O
Joe, I think we’re talking about much the same thing. Just looking yesterday, it was, in terms of calories, 65% fats, 32% protein, 2.5% carbs.
Hi, your body is slimming down related to intake which good, but I did not read anything about exercise related to output. If you don’t move that muscle mass, those negative enzymes are harder to decay or go away. I recommend to get that blood moving, e.g., a state of blood flux or cardiovascular flux. A moderate walk every day, and increasing in distance and duration. A cardiovascular flux will clear those negative enzymes within your body. It’s just movement. Wolf’s law is “If you don’t use it, you lose it”. Just add this simple task, not much at first, and you will mentally feel better. Muscle burns only glucose just like the brain. Try it you like it. I must do it every day, else I feel like crap. Sincerely yours, Becoming healthy is harder than most give credit for, it’s work. Live long, eat right and well, and exercise. SgtPete RN
I’ve been really crappy abut exercise for the last week or 10 days. I need to get some heavier kettlebells at home.
Charlie, hang in there buddy. There will be days, and weeks like this. You will feel defeated, the same, annoyed, the same, hungry, frustrated. After a while though, people will say “You look thinner” and they’ll mean it. You may not believe them, but eventually it will be true. You will be a different person in many ways, and you’ll have to adjust your mind a bit and get comfortable in your new skin.
Go with it, and don’t stop. Don’t get too obsessed with yourself and your routine (you’ll start to feel bad if you miss a day, and let’s face it, working out can suck), but keep the overall goal in mind and enjoy the rewards that come with it (more energy, more compliments, some ladies might check you out).
I’d recommend Mark’s Daily Apple for inspiration. But what has really, really worked for us is owning the cookbook “Well Fed” by Melissa Joulwan (her website is theclothesmakethegirl.com, if you want to see some of the recipes).
And what’s this stuff about not eating for 26 hours? If you eat a real breakfast, full of protein, you won’t be hungry. We typically have eggs, cottage cheese and sausage. I try to limit dairy, but it seems to help us stay on track. My boyfriend and I have been doing Paleo since March and both continue to lose weight.
If you seem to plateau (and we all do at some point), try taking some DHEA at night before bedtime. 25mg is a good amount to start with. I learned about this from my naturopathic doctor. It helps stabilize your hormone levels and cuts cortisol levels. It will help you sleep as well. Keep at it! In a few weeks you won’t even remember the slog.
25 lbs is good. If you feel like it’s not much, fill 6 x 2L bottles with water and ponder how much volume and weight it represents. Or just keep a collection of empty ones (add one for each couple of pounds) somewhere as a reminder and motivator. 2lbs a week is about as much as I ever managed long term; the key lay in doing it for over 4 months. My biggest problem has been the expense of replacing baggy pants.
When I last had a cold, I said the hell with it and got some Breyers Carb Smart Almond Bars. I know Taubes and Duke say avoid foods advertised as low carb, but these did a world of good on my throat, felt like a treat, and didn’t damage the program in the short run.
And if you’re short on sleep, your liver will be busy doing day work in the night and with things other than glycogen/glucose metabolism, and you will have an unsatisfiable urge for carbs. Ask any unadapted shift worker. At 3:00 a.m. three honey buns aren’t enough.
But if you’re sick, you’re sick. Exercise should wait til you’re not sick, and so should strict food regimens. The only people who should exercise with a cold are people who get paid for it. Athletes and musicians.
don’t give up man, I did a similar but far more aggressive diet recently, and weny from 225 to 173lb, and dropped fasting BG from 120s-130s on 2000 mg glucophage to 70s-80s on no medication whatsoever.
I’m not sure you will be able to veiw this, as the forum is private, but here’s a link to my log http://ironstrong.org/index.php?/topic/362-art-does-something/page__st__2010
it is totaly worth it
Charlie, keep up the great work. The photos show that you are succeeding! And, the blood sugar levels are trending down!!! I know the cold has you feeling down in the dumps, but keep your eye on the prize(s): normal blood sugar levels, etc.
I was blessed with a Mom and Dad who cherished and cared for my sister and me. We were materially poor, but rich where it counted. Over the years, I’ve heard some appalling stories of parental indifference, selfishness and outright maltreatment and it’s heartbreaking.
Have you tried Constant Comment tea? It’s flavored with cloves and orange peel. A dash of Sweet ‘n Low and you have a hot cup of comfort. Drinking it always takes me back to childhood.
I look forward to following your continued progress.
Slogging:
initial weight loss comes from using up the 1% by weight muscle glycogen & 5% by wt. liver glycogen; combined with the multiple water molecules that held that glycogen being peed out. Figure 1-2 weeks of this going on & it being good for 2 Kg. lost.
It is meanwhile lean body mass, protein in muscle, initially being lost on low carb diet. The conversion of protein to glucose is very energy (ATP) intensive & to produce ATP needed uses energy. The post-prandial (after meal) protein molecule is not what is mobilized for energy at this stage. Hunter societies are not fat because metabolizing high % protein is so energy intensive – not because they stay away from carbs (fruit/honey/tubers).
Ketones in the context of a low carb diet is not exactly the same as a clinical ketogenic diet. In a controled experiment of low carb diet (where consistently kept the same daily calorie intake) circulating ketones over time trend to increase (a non-linear increase), up to a ketone peak. After the ketone production peak level is reached it will, over time, begin to decline. In fact, ~ 6 months into low carb diet the measured ketones will be almost the same as when started.
Ketones are made in liver cells’ mitochondria when they catabolize (break) fats, enter blood circulation and carried to distant cells enter those cells’ mitochondria. It is in those distant mitochondria the ketone is catabolized into both aceto-acetate & co-enzymeA (good for alternative cellular energy production via Krebbs cycle).
Cocconut oil’s caprylic acid’s (~ 800 mg caprylic acid/tablespoon oil) medium chain (8 carbon) is readily broken out/absorbed in human intestine & shunted into circulation carried by VLDL as carprylic triglycderide. Caprylic triglycerides in the liver quickly yield ketones available in the circulation.
The effect in body cells’ mitochondria (cell’s powerhouse) is increased oxygen use by that mitochondria. Most importantly, this is occurring at the mitochondria staging area called Complex 1, where malate & pyruvate molecules get burned for energy. And, since it is pyruvate that is the body’s substrate for the process of gluco-neo-genesis (internally made glucose)there is less pyruvate driving daytime gluco-neo-genesis.
Which simply put, sets the body up to metabolically need to actually call up fat from adipose stores for burning and energy (because you make % less glucose, in real time, to meet daytime’s active energy demands).
Caprylic acid from cocconut oil will improve post-prandial glucose response. The blood glucose level ~ 1+ hour will be less, than otherwise. It is post-prandial glucose holding high (elevated) implicated in the risk consequences of metabolic syndrome (like causing protracted insulin levels in response to lingering glucose & consequence of that insulin keeping adipose fat cell’s from letting go fat). Meanwhile, the fasting (morning/empty stomach) glucose is not impaired by caprylic acid – so overnight one’s resting body performs natural gluco-neo-genesis for body glucose needed during rest & on waking.
I’m not going to pretend I understand the idea that your weight has anything to do with your emotions or anything else. I’m on record as saying your weight is correlated only to the amount of calories you consume.
But I will tell you something from my experience that may help. What I found when losing weight is that you may see lots of small cliffs. Not plateaus in my opinion, just periods of water retention. If you are dieting right, don’t lose the faith if the pounds don’t melt off consistently day to day. I would instead see 4-5 days of holding steady followed by a pound a day for 2 days. Now I didn’t always see that, sometimes it did melt off. But since I monitored my approach obsessively, I knew that I was doing it right. And by being patient for 4-5 days, the gains would catch up.
Good luck.
Hang in there! I second the Constant Comment tea idea. I use the decaf kind at night sometimes.
One’s body requires some time to figure things out while you keep up the program; at least mine does. I’ll lose, then plateau for a couple of weeks while things settle; then the weight starts to drop again.
For ice cream: are you near a place that sells Lucerne products? They make two very good low-carb ice cream bars; one with vanilla ice cream covered with chocolate, and one all chocolate.
For what it’s worth, I was a vanilla ice cream fanatic. These days it’s a tall glass of mostly club soda over ice, with a couple (ok, a few) tablespoons of half and half, vanilla, and stevia powder. Yum.
You can have hot cocoa. Use cocoa powder and heavy cream, water to taste, sweetener and a little vanilla. Rich, warm, yummy, good and only a carb or two for the cocoa powder.
I agree with those who say it’s long-term. For me, it’s the way I eat from now on, due to the health benefits. So I keep to a daily total carb count and don’t obsess. Example: this weekend I had awesome fish and chips, just no chips. Steamed broccoli instead of potatoes, and club soda to drink… so the breading on the fish was the carbs for the day.
You’re doing great. Hope it’s a better week for you!
Hang in there dude. But seriously, ditch the lat pulls and arm curls – they are a waste of time for weight loss and functional strength. Squats and deadlifts will burn more calories and give you functional strength. Base your workouts around those along with bench press, overhead press and some kind of rowing, either bent rows or a machine. Use heavy weights. You’re doing great. Keep going.
Do you have any recommendations for people with serious back problems? What you’re saying resonates with what I’ve read elsewhere, but I’m in no position to do either squats or dead-lifts. I remember dead-lifts from college, in particular, and there’s absolutely no way I can do those right now (if ever, frankly).
There are leg press machines, but those isolate the legs, which kind of misses the point, right? Part of the work involved with squats, for example, is that you’re using a lot of stabilizer muscles in your core as you’re moving up and down. Those are, obviously, critical to the process. But there’s not a chance in hell of me doing those right now. Maybe if I really get my back healthy again, which I’m working on right now. But in the interim, I need something else.
Any recommendations?
Charlie,
Esteban is right. You need compound exercises with heavy weights. Isolation exercises build less muscle and burn fewer calories. Bench, deadlift and squats are the magic. Might want to try thrusters with a 55lb kettle bell. KB swings are excellent assisting exercises.
If chocolate cake might make you feel better, try this one. It takes only a few minutes to prepare. It’s made with almond flour, cocoa, egg, butter, etc. and cooks in the microwave. A 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup is perfect in size (and has a handle for dispensing afterward!). My husband turns it onto a plate and we split it between us. It is delicious warm right out of the oven. Depending on choice of sweetener, the carbs can be very low – almond flour has lots of fiber. The recipe is at Linda’s Low Carb Menus & Recipes site:
http://www.genaw.com/lowcarb/3_minute_chocolate_cake.html
It really is good. Yet more proof that one does not need to do without the essentials on a low-carb diet!
I broke through something of a plateau last week. I’ve been stuck in the 212-215 range for a while now. I’d been floating between 215 and 218, and then a couple of weeks ago, I broke through that and was sitting comfortably at 212, with the occasional bounce up. Well, I hit 211 on Thursday, and stayed there on Friday. Then woke up Saturday morning to … 208!
Of course, we had an enormous Chanukah celebration Saturday night, with all kinds of crappy food just sitting around. Temptation resist we much? Not so much.
I was back up to 212 by Monday morning, but yesterday and today I’m back down to 211.
Yes, daily tracking is kinda lame. I’m aware of that. But it’s also good to see how bad eating has such an immediate impact. I’m not stressed about it, right now.
I also had my second round of injections, and my back is getting distinctly better. I drove way too much last week, and am still feeling it. But the bottom line is that had I driven that much even a month ago, I’d be completely crippled right now. The fact that it hurts, but isn’t totally debilitating, is an enormous leap forward. And I’m able to engage in much more rigorous stretching routines now.
So, all in all, I’m definitely doing better. I need to stabilize my weight at around 200. That’ll make me light enough for my body to support exercising a bit more strenuously. Which may mean I gain weight again, but it’ll be muscle mass, vs. this crappy fat I’m still carrying around.
Not a bad way to enter the holidays, if I do say so myself. Keep it up, Charlie. You continue to be an inspiration!