13 Weeks: Week Seven, In Which We Whine
Yeah, I’m doing a Taubes-inspired low-carb diet and high-intensity training, and this week I’m not particularly happy about it. So there. Follow me here at PJ Lifestyle or at the 13 Weeks Facebook page and see if “bah, humbug” is a weight-loss strategy.
So, it’s week seven, past the half-way mark in my 13 week experiment. Let’s hit the objective data first: my weight loss continues. I hit 275 this week for the first time in quite a while, and I’m settling down to very exactly 1.33 pounds a week. My glucose also continues to improve with a linear best-fit trend of about 1.5 mg/dL per week — which means, practically, that my glucose is often near normal even early in the morning when it seems to be highest. I could wish the weight loss was a little faster, but honestly the eating plan I’m on has really been very benign, very easy to do. In general, but I wasn’t going to whine until the next paragraph.
Okay, it’s the next paragraph. As you may recall, I was set to have a colonoscopy last Monday, and yes, thank you, everything came out all right. I don’t have to do another one for ten years. Starting back on Friday or Saturday, though, my big toe started to hurt. Right in the metatarsophalangeal joint, which is to say, where it meets the foot. It got inflamed and swollen, with a distinct red patch right over the joint. Monday, did the procedure; toe was still hurting, but I was, how you say, impaired. Finally thought about it, looked it up and decided I was having a gout attack, my first. Started taking the official jungle medicine cure for all things orthopedic: 800mg of ibuprofen 4× daily. And called the doc because, after all, I’m not a real doctor.
Went to the doctor, told him my history, said I thought it was gout, and how I was treating it.
He said, “you’re right. Fifty dollars, please.”
If it keeps recurring, there’s more stuff to do, but a lot of times it doesn’t. Gout basically is caused by uric acid precipitating out in a joint, and I’ve been on a high protein — and therefore high uric acid — diet, plus I was dehydrated from the prep. (When I said “everything came out all right”, I meant everything.) Still, it’s Friday night and my foot is basically healed.
I’ve been very successful at staying on the eating plan, but not as successful about the heavy weight lifting part, so I’ve adapted. I got some heavier kettlebells, and I’ve been doing the Tabata protocol with kettlebell exercises, including a lot of kettlebell swings. in fact, I got up Thursday morning, sore toe and all, and did a heavy workout.
Went to the office.
Realized my body was talking to me. It was saying, quote, “What the F**k was that!?”
All day Thursday, my arms were tingly and tired. Friday morning, it was the muscles of my inner thighs, the adductors and gracilis. AND my shoulders and arms. What this demonstrates, of course, is that the kettlebells, especially kettlebell swings, really do get a lot of different muscles groups.
Went to the office, and there was Christmas coffeecake waiting. Yes, I did resist, helped in no small part by knowing the last time I broke training with some wheat, I was sick for days. But it sure looked good.
The last thing I’ve been noticing this week is that I seem to spend a lot of time thinking about food. Where to get it, what to eat, did I record it? I’d like to be able to, say, get a McDonald’s breakfast on a hurried morning.
What’s the point of all this whining? Besides the pleasure of complaining in itself? Well, as I see it, it’s this. As I said last week, the thrill of the eating plan is pretty much gone. The original spectacular rate of loss has settled down to something close to what would be predicted by the calorie deficit alone. Which is still fine — I’m eating bacon and eggs, and chicken, and steak, and big salads, and I really don’t feel hungry. My blood sugar is looking much better, but that’s a fairly abstract thing to notice too. And after seven weeks, it’s now a matter of just keeping on.
This week, I’ve got Christmas coming up, of course, but I’m going to be very careful about the wheat after the way Thanksgiving went. I have the week off, and two more heavy kettlebells coming, and time to actually get to lift. Oh, and I got a Withings scale — it transmits your weight over WiFi. I’ll have a review of it next week.
It should be a good week.
Gout is caused by uric acid crystals in the joints, and you can …. not “cure”, but “ameliorate”, the symptoms by drinking highly acidic cranberry juice. If you hate cranberry juice, the cranberry-apple blends seem to work almost as well.
Gout in my toe seems to go away when I eat a hand full of dried cherries (Wal Mart store brand) every morning. Sadly, they have a load of sugar in them.
I love cranberry juice, actually, but it’s not low carb.
So, don’t drink a gallon of it!
Think of it as medicine.
There is a low carb version of cranberry juice if you look around in a few stores (Target has it in my area), it has sugar substitute in it, but it is like a medicine.
Cranberry juice is too carby, but cranberry pills will work, too. You can get them at most health food stores. I used to buy them at Trader Joe’s, but they’ve stopped carrying them.
Hang tough! If it was easy we’d all look like Conan the Libertarian. I have to watch how much cooked spinach I eat when on a diet, it tends to bring on a gout flare up if I overdo it. 4 cups of raw spinach turns into 2 bites of cooked spinach, it seems like. Easy for it to sneak up on us.
Endo here. Colchicine, allopurinol and the newer drug Uloric are all your friends for gout. It is not called one of the inborn errors of metabolism for nothing. Remember the first thing the Donner Party survivors asked for when they got to Sutters Fort was bread. Hang in there.
allupurinol works for high uric acid
i’ve also heard accounts of those drinking tons of fresh celery juice to clear out the gout in a couple days
Yeah, that’s one of the things I’ll have to try if I have more attacks. but the treatment of choice for a first attack is big NSAIDs, so I got that right.
You know, I’ve been having general joint issues for years. I wonder if that’s what is going on. It’s easy to buy into “yeah, that sounds like what I’m dealing with!” But I really wonder. I’ll have to do some research.
I don’t know how it fits into your diet, but Anne Louise Gittleman writes articles for First magazine. It’s on the grocery-store check-out line. It looks cheap, like a secretary’s magazine. The recipes are stellar.
She recommends this lemon juice, chia- seed slurry first thing in the morning. Sometimes she says ‘cranberry’ or ‘pomegranate’ with the fiber slurry. I’ve never made it. It sounds revolting, but I saw an RD keep it in the freezer at work, to drink all day. She loved it. She looked like Eva Longoria, so she was doing all sorts of things right.
You might like. It might make life easier for you.
I wouldn’t mind looking like Eva as long as I didn’t think like she does, and if I wasn’t 25+ years older. Charlie might have to shave his beard to look like her.
Don’t do it, Charlie! (Admiral Akbar voice) It’s a trap!!
Don’t worry. Have you tried to find a nice pair of pumps in men’s size 12? It’s not worth the trouble.
Drink more water. But you knew that. /smartass
As for craving the coffee cake or whatever … I went totally wheat-free a number of years back for a weird skin condition … now I’ve relaxed that regimen, but pretty much avoid breads and pastas and I don’t miss them. Maybe once the hoo-rah and blogging is over and more time passes, you’ll find your body doesn’t really crave that stuff anymore … stick with it and congrats and kudos to you.
Thanks. I don’t know that I craved it so much as ai remembered craving it. In any case, as I say, recalling the effects post-Thanksgiving enabled me to stave off the cravings pretty easily.
Agree, drink more water! Helps with just about everything. (/unwanted advice off)
Thank you for writing about your diet and exercise adventure. I was skinny as a stick until I turned 45, but then everything I put in my mouth magically appeared on and stayed on my middle as fat, fat, fat. Very frustrating. After 5 years I’ve discovered the hard way that to maintain my semi-svelte figure, I have to keep my caloric intake at about 1/2 what it was up to age 45. Not only does the fat accumulate at the skinniest slice of pizza, it’s now very difficult to evict it once its settled in. I feel like Rhoda (Mary Tyler Moore Show): “I don’t know why I should even bother to eat this. I should just apply it directly to my hips.”
Reading about your challenges and successes helps keep me motervated to watch my own diet, and inspires me to keep the cheating to a minimum. My daily mantra is, Nothing tastes as good as being fit and healthy feels.
Congratulations for working at this and thank you for sharing your experiences good & bad with us, and keep up the good work. I really enjoy your updates.
There is nothing stopping you from eating breakfast at McDonalds. Every morning I go through the drive-through and get two sausage biscuits and a large diet coke. Then I eat the sausage patties and throw the biscuits away. I’ve done that 5+ times a week for a year and a half, during which I lost 60 or so pounds and kept it off. I’d rather just order the sausage patties, but the drive-through people get all confused if you do that.
Average weight loss of 1.3 pounds a week sounds just about right to me. It’s mostly fat. Exercise and adequate protein consumption help prevent loss of muscle mass. Losing more than a couple pounds of fat week over week is usually not sustainable for the long run.
The massive quick losses we see on TV’s “Biggest Loser” aren’t realistic for vast majority of us. Contestants exercise at least 2-3 hours a day and are motivated by the $250,000 first prize (in U.S.) and perhaps a shot at fame.
-Steve
Oh, I’ll happily take the quarter-mil.
The psychology of this really does seem increasingly to be the interesting part, although the physiological aspects of carb restriction are really interesting too. But, psychologically, one aspect of it is that as I settle down to the 1.3 lb/week loss, the variance begins to overwhelm the weight loss. After hitting 275 on Wednesday, I popped back up to 277.9 yesterday and 277.3 today. When I look at my charts, it’s clear that’s no big deal — the linear-fit trend line is fine, and when I look back I see plenty of examples of my weight spiking upward for a couple days, then plateauing, then dropping significantly.
But looking back at the actual values, and even looking at just the Sunday weighings, in actual pounds what happened is that I gained back a pound and a half from last week even though I’ve been diligent about what I eat. When that happens, it’s hard to trust the process.
I wonder what would happen if you added… say 50 minutes of cardio 4 times a week? I know cardio workouts are currently out of fashion but you’ll be doing your heart alot of good and burning 2000 calories a week.
I saw something in my Dr’s office a long time ago “Fat matters, carbs count, but, calories are king.”
Well, the first thing that would happen is I’d die of boredom. In all seriousness, I would have trouble carving out four hours a week or more; in any case, Tabata protocol is aerobic exercise, at least in the sense that it quickly improves vO2-uptake which is the usual measure of fitness.
I really don’t think the evidence agrees with your doctor’s sign, either. Have a look at the Taubes books. Also remember that blood glucose is one of my issues, and while I don’t mention it in this piece, apparently intolerance for wheat is another.
What is in or out of fashion is irrelevant. All that matters is what gets results, and the fact is that short, high-intensity training sessions get better results than long “cardio” workouts.
Why? See the videos I posted at the link for an explanation by Pepperdine University researchers.
If you don’t have time to watch both videos in their entirety, skip to 7:00 on the second one.
http://snowgoosechronicles.blogspot.com/2012/12/intensity-vs-cardio.html
Thanks, Oscar — I’ll feature that more prominently in this week.
I get my cardio workout by swing dancing a couple times a week.
If you are starting to think about goodies, you might want to start playing with flour substitutes. I’ve tried a few here with moderate success:
http://www.genaw.com/lowcarb/
You can use ground almond flour / flax seed flour as a decent wheat flour substitute. First experiment was using the almond flour as a bread crumb substitute for baking fish. Not too bad. Second try was as a batter for fried fish. Screwed that one up pretty bad. Tasted like cardboard. But did not go over carbs.
Did play a bit with granulated splenda as a sugar substitute, though I am not all that happy with the result as yet.
The web site has a cauliflower substitute for mashed potatoes. It tasted like ground cauliflower. Tried to make the functional equivalent of a potato pancakes, but ended up needing more egg to hold it together. It wouldn’t fry up all that well.
Still don’t have a real good substitute for fruit yet, though I have reintroduced a few berries along with the eggs and sausage for breakfast to keep it interesting.
Finally, I would suggest playing with salsas. You don’t have to be a pepperhead to play with them. They also have the added impact of being pretty lo carb as long as you watch the fruit juice and sugar you add.
You can also add a T of organic apple cider vinegar to a glass of water to keep it interesting. And I have started playing with herbal teas in the evening.
Merry Christmas to you and yours -
Finally, I would suggest playing with salsas. You don’t have to be a pepperhead to play with them. They also have the added impact of being pretty lo carb as long as you watch the fruit juice and sugar you add.
Man, I grew up on the north edge of the Española chile farms. (All that stuff about Hatch chiles being best? A canard.) I love chiles, salsas, and so on.
Great work Charlie and thanks for writing about it. The key is what to do after your 13 weeks are over to keep and maintain what gains (or loss) you’ve made. I’m using the Body By Vi system and their 90 Day Challenge (http://www.theritterchallenge.com/), but most important for me, it doesn’t end at 90 days. I set a goal, then work toward it. At the end of my 90 days, I assess my results, re-evaluate and set a new goal for the next 90 days. I’ve lost 59 pounds and went from 285 to 226 since August 1st. I have no interest in letting it come back. This plan keeps me focused on a short term goal all year long. 205 is in my sights. It’s low carb, low (bad)fat, low sodium, low sugar -it’s delicious and I can still a lot of great food too.
Good luck.
http://www.theritterchallenge.com/
You know, it’s amazing how many people want me to push the Visalus stuff. But you’re right, and I’m starting to think about the next 13 weeks.