Ok, so that last post was negative, so I thought I'd write a short one about positive things about the PHD, so far-
1. Mental health. I kinda already said this in a couple posts but one weird symptom I got after about 6 weeks of low carb (net carbs < 60 daily) is a very noticeable increase in anxiety symptoms. This has vanished now. Great. No matter how I'm doing with being fat fat fatty, it's kinda hard to function when simple things like going to the theater freak you out. I'm even hopeful that the better nutritional profile will help in even the "non-weird" situations that I get nervous in, like flying.
2. HAIR. Lol wut? Yes- I have suddenly noticed an increase in the thickness and density of the hair on my super male pattern baldness head. No, I don't think I have discovered a magical cure for baldness. However, it appears that SOME of the thinning of my hair was shit nutrition. My huge bald spot is less huge and the hair on the center top of my head- getting dangerously close to comb over territory- has suddenly rebounded, and while not thick by any means, no longer looks embarrassing.
NICE.
So yeah, those are good things.
Saturday, March 24, 2018
Perfect Health Diet Challenges
Alright, so I'm a little over two weeks into a three week spring, so here's a progress report.
Meh.
So basically I'm running a slight energy deficit, so I haven't gained in any weight or size. But I haven't had the kind of large caloric deficits required to cut into my fat mass. So that's a problem.
The simplest and best reason is I'm cheating a lot on this diet. Ugh. Probably in the past 15 days, I've had at least 5 in which I ate significant amounts of non-PHD food (anything wheat/cereal grain except rice, sugar beyond really small amounts, etc). And I've had a handful of other days where I have eaten PHD foods to proportions that have pushed my calorie limits up.
But, the main issue is the cheating.
Following the PHD diet perfectly, but not optimizing it to weight loss, I land at around 2300 calories or so. My maintenance level is something like 2500, so obviously this tiny deficit isn't going to produce much loss. This is similar to eating low carb, actually.
Except low carb was easier to optimize.
Except low carb was causing a large, very noticeable uptick in anxiety symptoms. Symptoms that have vanished since adopting the PHD!!!!!! ARGH!
Are there also other reasons (excuses!) for the cheating? Sure. They aren't important because you know, personal responsibility, but worth considering.
1. Cold - I got one. I rarely get sick so when I get a cold I tend to act like a baby about it. Colds for me either cause me to lose a bunch of weight or gain- mainly because the over the counter cold meds make me apathetic to food. So I either eat a bunch because I don't pay attention, or eat little for the same reason. This has been a push this time I think.
2. Stress - We are pushing towards an important deadline at work and I think the stress was affecting me. This is abating now, fortunately.
3. Daylight savings time shift - This wrecked my circadian rhythm which I had tuned really well in February.
On the exercise front, I was in general doing much better until the cold. I'm still averaging over 1500 steps more per day than the previous month, however.
Alright, so with low carb I barely cheated at all despite the severity of the diet. Whereas on the more permissive PHD I cheat a lot more. WHAT IS GOING ON.
I think the PHD's strength is also its weakness: in giving the dieter so much freedom, you start to allow that little voice in your head to give you liberties: "well, you aren't desperately trying to restrict carbs, so....." Those of you who do not struggle with weight cannot possibly know the insidious internal negotiation that goes on in your head, constantly. It takes great mental focus to tune this out. It goes something like this:
Voice: "Oh wow, there is delicious food that is off plan in your home. Hey, just have a bite. Just a bite won't cause you to fall of the wagon."
Me: "No. I'm not hitting my calorie goals because I constantly have to go off plan."
Voice shuts up for awhile.
Later, usually after kids are in bed
Voice: "You made it through another day! Well done good sir. You know what would feel good? Some dopamine. I can make some for you, real fast, if you eat DAT FOOD."
Me: "I gotta admit, dopamine sounds great. But..... I probably shouldn't."
Voice quiets down.
Later, usually after my wife goes to bed.
Voice: "You know, you got through the WHOLE day. Treat. Yo. Self. You know you HATE going to bed hungry. You HATE that feeling. Because night eating is a thing you've struggled with in your life, so if you go to bed a little hungry now, you know there is a 30% chance that something happens that wakes you up, because you have kids and cats! And if you wake up at 3AM, you'll be so ravenous you'll probably plow through that entire carton of ice cream in one sitting. So why not have that food now? Just a little. I'll even through in dopamine, for good measure."
Me: "well, ok. You know what? I deserve this. Just a little bite...."
*at least 500 calories later*
Shit. *Opens up loseit app, logs the results, gets sad*
So basically my running theory is that low carb probably lowers enough of the feel good chemicals in my brain pan that I find it easier to use my will to resist over eating (or, in the case of many days on the PHD, eating to maintenance). Unfortunately this same brain chemistry seems to hurt me in other ways.
So, going forward, I realize I need to optimize the PHD structure to my situation. This probably requires lowering carbs to something to around 100 a day. My hope is that doing this will allow my brain to not "go nuts" while at the same time assisting my willpower in telling that "voice" to shut the F up.
The PHD allows one pound of safe starches a day. This, for me, needs adjustment. I should probably reduce this. Something that would get me to 100 carbs or so a day. I believe I'll do this via the following:
Rice: reduce this to one serving (cup) a day, maximum. Understand that stuff like rice crackers, tapioca flour based things are DESTROYERS OF WORLDS similar to how peanut butter destroys me on low carb.
Potato: The vastly superior safe starch in every way. If possible I should try to make my entire day's safe starch allotment potatoes. Potatoes are nutritionally awesome and way less energy dense than rice- they have half the calories per pound and almost half the carbs.
I should probably also reduce the amount of fruits/sweet vegetables, although to be honest I don't eat so much of these currently that I think it's a big deal.
Make it a huge priority to get the 1 lb of non-starchy vegetables in. The fiber is great and hunger controlling.
No change in the meat. Do what I do.
For today, though, I'm going to fast, to try to catch up a little. If I do that, I should at least have a chance of actually accomplishing a loss on Wednesday, however meager that is.
Future challenges:
I have guests coming and therefore special meals. It's going to be a very challenging time, but one of my health goals is to have a way of eating that doesn't just stop when anything out of the ordinary happens. My hope is, even with tweaks, the PHD will allow me to take friends to restaurants and still have enough of the "menu" available to enjoy.
Meh.
So basically I'm running a slight energy deficit, so I haven't gained in any weight or size. But I haven't had the kind of large caloric deficits required to cut into my fat mass. So that's a problem.
The simplest and best reason is I'm cheating a lot on this diet. Ugh. Probably in the past 15 days, I've had at least 5 in which I ate significant amounts of non-PHD food (anything wheat/cereal grain except rice, sugar beyond really small amounts, etc). And I've had a handful of other days where I have eaten PHD foods to proportions that have pushed my calorie limits up.
But, the main issue is the cheating.
Following the PHD diet perfectly, but not optimizing it to weight loss, I land at around 2300 calories or so. My maintenance level is something like 2500, so obviously this tiny deficit isn't going to produce much loss. This is similar to eating low carb, actually.
Except low carb was easier to optimize.
Except low carb was causing a large, very noticeable uptick in anxiety symptoms. Symptoms that have vanished since adopting the PHD!!!!!! ARGH!
Are there also other reasons (excuses!) for the cheating? Sure. They aren't important because you know, personal responsibility, but worth considering.
1. Cold - I got one. I rarely get sick so when I get a cold I tend to act like a baby about it. Colds for me either cause me to lose a bunch of weight or gain- mainly because the over the counter cold meds make me apathetic to food. So I either eat a bunch because I don't pay attention, or eat little for the same reason. This has been a push this time I think.
2. Stress - We are pushing towards an important deadline at work and I think the stress was affecting me. This is abating now, fortunately.
3. Daylight savings time shift - This wrecked my circadian rhythm which I had tuned really well in February.
On the exercise front, I was in general doing much better until the cold. I'm still averaging over 1500 steps more per day than the previous month, however.
Alright, so with low carb I barely cheated at all despite the severity of the diet. Whereas on the more permissive PHD I cheat a lot more. WHAT IS GOING ON.
I think the PHD's strength is also its weakness: in giving the dieter so much freedom, you start to allow that little voice in your head to give you liberties: "well, you aren't desperately trying to restrict carbs, so....." Those of you who do not struggle with weight cannot possibly know the insidious internal negotiation that goes on in your head, constantly. It takes great mental focus to tune this out. It goes something like this:
Voice: "Oh wow, there is delicious food that is off plan in your home. Hey, just have a bite. Just a bite won't cause you to fall of the wagon."
Me: "No. I'm not hitting my calorie goals because I constantly have to go off plan."
Voice shuts up for awhile.
Later, usually after kids are in bed
Voice: "You made it through another day! Well done good sir. You know what would feel good? Some dopamine. I can make some for you, real fast, if you eat DAT FOOD."
Me: "I gotta admit, dopamine sounds great. But..... I probably shouldn't."
Voice quiets down.
Later, usually after my wife goes to bed.
Voice: "You know, you got through the WHOLE day. Treat. Yo. Self. You know you HATE going to bed hungry. You HATE that feeling. Because night eating is a thing you've struggled with in your life, so if you go to bed a little hungry now, you know there is a 30% chance that something happens that wakes you up, because you have kids and cats! And if you wake up at 3AM, you'll be so ravenous you'll probably plow through that entire carton of ice cream in one sitting. So why not have that food now? Just a little. I'll even through in dopamine, for good measure."
Me: "well, ok. You know what? I deserve this. Just a little bite...."
*at least 500 calories later*
Shit. *Opens up loseit app, logs the results, gets sad*
So basically my running theory is that low carb probably lowers enough of the feel good chemicals in my brain pan that I find it easier to use my will to resist over eating (or, in the case of many days on the PHD, eating to maintenance). Unfortunately this same brain chemistry seems to hurt me in other ways.
So, going forward, I realize I need to optimize the PHD structure to my situation. This probably requires lowering carbs to something to around 100 a day. My hope is that doing this will allow my brain to not "go nuts" while at the same time assisting my willpower in telling that "voice" to shut the F up.
The PHD allows one pound of safe starches a day. This, for me, needs adjustment. I should probably reduce this. Something that would get me to 100 carbs or so a day. I believe I'll do this via the following:
Rice: reduce this to one serving (cup) a day, maximum. Understand that stuff like rice crackers, tapioca flour based things are DESTROYERS OF WORLDS similar to how peanut butter destroys me on low carb.
Potato: The vastly superior safe starch in every way. If possible I should try to make my entire day's safe starch allotment potatoes. Potatoes are nutritionally awesome and way less energy dense than rice- they have half the calories per pound and almost half the carbs.
I should probably also reduce the amount of fruits/sweet vegetables, although to be honest I don't eat so much of these currently that I think it's a big deal.
Make it a huge priority to get the 1 lb of non-starchy vegetables in. The fiber is great and hunger controlling.
No change in the meat. Do what I do.
For today, though, I'm going to fast, to try to catch up a little. If I do that, I should at least have a chance of actually accomplishing a loss on Wednesday, however meager that is.
Future challenges:
I have guests coming and therefore special meals. It's going to be a very challenging time, but one of my health goals is to have a way of eating that doesn't just stop when anything out of the ordinary happens. My hope is, even with tweaks, the PHD will allow me to take friends to restaurants and still have enough of the "menu" available to enjoy.
Sunday, March 11, 2018
I'M BACK! And, I think, better than ever? (March 11th 2018)
It's been almost a year since I've wrote in this blog. So here is a quick recap on what has happened since:
I went on that ten day trip I mentioned and it was awesome!
I also did that stupid thing that you always do; I didn't get "back on the diet horse" immediately upon returning home. So that was bad.
Summer was a yo-yo affair; I had a really hard time recapturing the intermittent fasting mojo that I described in previous posts. Without a trip to motivate me, during a pretty brutal plan like that was just too hard.
In August, I decided to try "the potato hack." It seemed healthy but boring, so what the heck? I did drop a significant amount of weight in a very short time, *and* I felt great too- no weird side effects. Neat.
But, of course, eating only cold potatoes is, er, boring. So nopity nope to that.
Then I had a crazy stressful September-January. THE WORKS. Career stuff, life stuff, another move (this time just in-town move, but still a move).
In December I dug back into the diet book/blog literature, inspired by a work colleague who also did the same. This led me to go back into low carbing with new resolve in January.
In the past, I would do cyclic keto, as opposed to a true low carb diet (so keto Monday-Saturday, then a big refeed day). This worked well but the same boredom problems kicked in, since for cyclic keto, you want the carbs to be as low as possible, even eschewing some of the greens and ground berries you might allow on a typical low carb diet.
For this attempt in January, I did a more standard low carb diet which allowed for all the non-starchy veggies I wanted, and some ground berries. No cycles. Just pure low carb eating each day. For almost two months, I ate *cleaner than I ever have,* in terms of sticking to the diet. I think only two days or so did I fall off the wagon. In almost two months! Wow!
So what were the results of that?
The good:
Lost about 2 inches from the chest, and about 3 inches from the waist. Don't get too excited, I regained across the board since my post last year (I'll update the running totals in a bit, and remind new readers what those are). But it was good to do that!
I lost about 5lbs in two months. Not a great rate, but unlike intermittent fasting, I didn't feel like I was suffering: just eating more or less when hungry, with *some* tweaks made to lower the daily energy intake some. Again I'll update the running totals.
The bad:
The jitters. Anxiety. Uh oh. This was unexpected and pretty bad, to be honest. I've always had fairly mild, episodic problems with anxiety. I'm not on meds or therapy, as it mainly is stress based and goes away if the stressors causing it dissipate (sometimes the anxiety is a delayed reaction to built up/previous stress).
But a week or so after starting low carb, which is longer than I've ever done it (remember: I had only done cyclic keto before), I started to get increased generalized anxiety. Of particular worry was heart palpitations, sometimes worryingly at night when trying to sleep.
Objectively, it seemed clear that the palpitations weren't because of some new health malady (palpitations are usually harmless). I was noticing one, making myself nervous, the and the adrenaline from getting nervous makes you have more of them, and that's the negative cycle.
My first step in fixing this was upping my supplement game. On low carb, you can get low on electrolytes and minerals, particularly magnesium and potassium, as you pee those out as you lose fluids. I'm always pretty good about fluids/salt in take, so I focused on the minerals.
That seemed to fix the night time jitters, as did getting more diligent with my caffeine intake (cut way back to just a couple espresso shots* in the morning).
*To the ignorant, "a couple shots of espresso" seems like a lot, but in fact one shot of espresso coffee has only half the caffeine of a cup, so a couple shots is something like 1.5-2 cups of drip coffee. All in all I've cut back from the 3-6 cup habit I used to have to 2-3, at most.
But I still had more generalized anxiety. In particular, going to movie theaters was creating an agoraphobic response I've never had before. This was bizarre: in the past few years I've developed mild-to-moderate anxiety on airplanes, and sitting in a movie theater was feeling exactly the same. What was going on?
I figured out that it was likely a drop of serotonin levels in the brain as a result of the diet. So after two months, I decided I needed a change.
More carbs? Back to crappy SAD? What?
Nope, I was able to find a diet that addresses these issues, seems well thought out, and to be honest, is more fun than I thought. Enter Paul Jaminet's "Perfect Health Diet.
Paul Jaminet is a PHd as is his wife. These are ridiculously smart, "NASA level mega smart" people. They've done a lot of wonderful meta-research and their findings seem to align with my own personal experiences. Such as:
1. Low carb does indeed lower appetite levels, which is good.
2. However some carbs are needed, for a variety of reasons, and for many of us, lowering them to keto or near keto levels is not great.
3. Accepting that the paleo movement has uncovered some great truths, but hold the phone, let's not just throw out the baby with the bathwater on modern medicine.
And here is the website for the diet, btw.
They don't update the blog as much anymore because they are involved with an interested anti-Cancer startup company, but it doesn't matter: there is almost 8 years of regular posts to sift through.
So in the broadest possible strokes, the PHD can be summarized as:
1. Meats good! Just not pork so much (great series on the dangers of pork on the blog btw).
2. SAFE starches in moderate amounts, also good! Just no grains, legumes, or beans. Ground tubers and rice, basically. This means I can eat at Mitsuwa Market again!!!
3. Sweet fruits good! Sweet veggies good!
4. Seed oils SUPER BAD. Fish oils good but DO NOT GO CRAZY.
5. Intermittent fasting is good! But they advocate a moderate, 8 hour eating window approach.
6. Circadian rhythm SUPER DUPER IMPORTANT. Getting to bed on time for regular sleep is VITAL.
7. Supplementing with the right things SUPER IMPORTANT. Now, they have a huge array of things, but for most of us, I would say a good multi-vitamin+vitamin D covers the majority of daily needs.
8. ORGAN MEATS SOMETIMES! This led me to eat chicken livers for the first time in my life on Saturday. It was... surprisingly pretty good?
My friend Steven commented that it was too complex, and I would admit, yes, at first glance this seems that way. But to my surprise, in three days I've actually had a lot of fun tinkering. I think there is part of my brain: the part of my brain that likes video games, incidentally - that actually enjoys going this in-depth with a diet. And I can already tell it is getting simpler. Of HUGE BENEFIT is ALREADY being in the habit of using a tracking app like LoseIt!, which I've been using for years and years. With his, it is a simple matter to see at a glance what I've eaten and what I need to eat less of or more of in a day.
Early results seem to be similar to low carb in terms of energy intake: about 2300 calories if I don't tweak anything for weight loss at all. This is pretty good- I would lose weight if I did exactly this every day. It would just be very slow and inefficient, and of course like any human being I won't do this exactly (though I am hopeful this will be an "every day, permanent change").
On the PHD website, they of course have many suggestions in how to tweak it for weight loss, which I'm doing. It's basically to cut back on some added fats which means you get a fairly even distribution of carb calories, fat calories, and protein calories.
But that's the thing: this is a health diet, not a weight loss plan, which is why I'm excited about it. I think what I've been doing wrong for years and years is sprinting to short term weight loss goals, and not fixing permanent eating and diet issues. I think having this diet as a base, and tweaking to get my desired results, is a great start for me.
Early results?
Well, I don't weigh in and measure on a daily basis anymore because that is just stupid to do. I now do three week intervals, and I just kicked off a new three week stretch. But the anxiety symptoms are getting better! I went to the theater yesterday and for the first time since before the low carb diet, I felt totally normal. The heart palpitations and other nervous symptoms/panicky feelings are going away as well.
I also don't really feel the bad symptoms of excessive carb intake, like sleepiness, lethargy, etc. Clearly these sort of symptoms are from eating grains, sugars and other refined carbs. For me, the safe starches simply do not have these effects.
Hunger levels are fine, but I do expect to feel more hunger than the average perfect health dieter, since I am tweaking for weight loss.
OK!
CURRENT TOTALS/PROGRESS
To any newcomers, I do not put actual weights and measurements here. I just state what my progress is from the "Start" of the blog. This will remain the same. Alas, the end of 2017 saw some slippage (and to be honest, the progress made last year was short term probably water weight loss crammed in for my vacation anyway).
Weight Loss From Start: -5 lbs (instead of -17, lol).
Inches from chest: -2"
Inches from Waist: -3"
DAILY STEPS (For exercise, I am doing a goal of daily steps. 10k steps is the goal for each day, although I can't promise I'll update the blog each day, but I do plan to update often).
Yesterday: ~6000 steps. Meh. I did get outside for over an hour, but alas, it was with my kids, which meant lots of stopping to referee fights and arguments. This is why "just exercise with your kids!" type advice bugs me. The kids end up sapping my efficiency.
NEW! - Sleep - Since I am now very focused on sleep, I'm going to track this metric
midnight sleep time, awake at 8pm with daylight savings time shift. ~7 hours, which is my normal circadian rhythm, but the cat woke me up at 3pm, so low quality today, as expected.
I went on that ten day trip I mentioned and it was awesome!
I also did that stupid thing that you always do; I didn't get "back on the diet horse" immediately upon returning home. So that was bad.
Summer was a yo-yo affair; I had a really hard time recapturing the intermittent fasting mojo that I described in previous posts. Without a trip to motivate me, during a pretty brutal plan like that was just too hard.
In August, I decided to try "the potato hack." It seemed healthy but boring, so what the heck? I did drop a significant amount of weight in a very short time, *and* I felt great too- no weird side effects. Neat.
But, of course, eating only cold potatoes is, er, boring. So nopity nope to that.
Then I had a crazy stressful September-January. THE WORKS. Career stuff, life stuff, another move (this time just in-town move, but still a move).
In December I dug back into the diet book/blog literature, inspired by a work colleague who also did the same. This led me to go back into low carbing with new resolve in January.
In the past, I would do cyclic keto, as opposed to a true low carb diet (so keto Monday-Saturday, then a big refeed day). This worked well but the same boredom problems kicked in, since for cyclic keto, you want the carbs to be as low as possible, even eschewing some of the greens and ground berries you might allow on a typical low carb diet.
For this attempt in January, I did a more standard low carb diet which allowed for all the non-starchy veggies I wanted, and some ground berries. No cycles. Just pure low carb eating each day. For almost two months, I ate *cleaner than I ever have,* in terms of sticking to the diet. I think only two days or so did I fall off the wagon. In almost two months! Wow!
So what were the results of that?
The good:
Lost about 2 inches from the chest, and about 3 inches from the waist. Don't get too excited, I regained across the board since my post last year (I'll update the running totals in a bit, and remind new readers what those are). But it was good to do that!
I lost about 5lbs in two months. Not a great rate, but unlike intermittent fasting, I didn't feel like I was suffering: just eating more or less when hungry, with *some* tweaks made to lower the daily energy intake some. Again I'll update the running totals.
The bad:
The jitters. Anxiety. Uh oh. This was unexpected and pretty bad, to be honest. I've always had fairly mild, episodic problems with anxiety. I'm not on meds or therapy, as it mainly is stress based and goes away if the stressors causing it dissipate (sometimes the anxiety is a delayed reaction to built up/previous stress).
But a week or so after starting low carb, which is longer than I've ever done it (remember: I had only done cyclic keto before), I started to get increased generalized anxiety. Of particular worry was heart palpitations, sometimes worryingly at night when trying to sleep.
Objectively, it seemed clear that the palpitations weren't because of some new health malady (palpitations are usually harmless). I was noticing one, making myself nervous, the and the adrenaline from getting nervous makes you have more of them, and that's the negative cycle.
My first step in fixing this was upping my supplement game. On low carb, you can get low on electrolytes and minerals, particularly magnesium and potassium, as you pee those out as you lose fluids. I'm always pretty good about fluids/salt in take, so I focused on the minerals.
That seemed to fix the night time jitters, as did getting more diligent with my caffeine intake (cut way back to just a couple espresso shots* in the morning).
*To the ignorant, "a couple shots of espresso" seems like a lot, but in fact one shot of espresso coffee has only half the caffeine of a cup, so a couple shots is something like 1.5-2 cups of drip coffee. All in all I've cut back from the 3-6 cup habit I used to have to 2-3, at most.
But I still had more generalized anxiety. In particular, going to movie theaters was creating an agoraphobic response I've never had before. This was bizarre: in the past few years I've developed mild-to-moderate anxiety on airplanes, and sitting in a movie theater was feeling exactly the same. What was going on?
I figured out that it was likely a drop of serotonin levels in the brain as a result of the diet. So after two months, I decided I needed a change.
More carbs? Back to crappy SAD? What?
Nope, I was able to find a diet that addresses these issues, seems well thought out, and to be honest, is more fun than I thought. Enter Paul Jaminet's "Perfect Health Diet.
Paul Jaminet is a PHd as is his wife. These are ridiculously smart, "NASA level mega smart" people. They've done a lot of wonderful meta-research and their findings seem to align with my own personal experiences. Such as:
1. Low carb does indeed lower appetite levels, which is good.
2. However some carbs are needed, for a variety of reasons, and for many of us, lowering them to keto or near keto levels is not great.
3. Accepting that the paleo movement has uncovered some great truths, but hold the phone, let's not just throw out the baby with the bathwater on modern medicine.
And here is the website for the diet, btw.
They don't update the blog as much anymore because they are involved with an interested anti-Cancer startup company, but it doesn't matter: there is almost 8 years of regular posts to sift through.
So in the broadest possible strokes, the PHD can be summarized as:
1. Meats good! Just not pork so much (great series on the dangers of pork on the blog btw).
2. SAFE starches in moderate amounts, also good! Just no grains, legumes, or beans. Ground tubers and rice, basically. This means I can eat at Mitsuwa Market again!!!
3. Sweet fruits good! Sweet veggies good!
4. Seed oils SUPER BAD. Fish oils good but DO NOT GO CRAZY.
5. Intermittent fasting is good! But they advocate a moderate, 8 hour eating window approach.
6. Circadian rhythm SUPER DUPER IMPORTANT. Getting to bed on time for regular sleep is VITAL.
7. Supplementing with the right things SUPER IMPORTANT. Now, they have a huge array of things, but for most of us, I would say a good multi-vitamin+vitamin D covers the majority of daily needs.
8. ORGAN MEATS SOMETIMES! This led me to eat chicken livers for the first time in my life on Saturday. It was... surprisingly pretty good?
My friend Steven commented that it was too complex, and I would admit, yes, at first glance this seems that way. But to my surprise, in three days I've actually had a lot of fun tinkering. I think there is part of my brain: the part of my brain that likes video games, incidentally - that actually enjoys going this in-depth with a diet. And I can already tell it is getting simpler. Of HUGE BENEFIT is ALREADY being in the habit of using a tracking app like LoseIt!, which I've been using for years and years. With his, it is a simple matter to see at a glance what I've eaten and what I need to eat less of or more of in a day.
Early results seem to be similar to low carb in terms of energy intake: about 2300 calories if I don't tweak anything for weight loss at all. This is pretty good- I would lose weight if I did exactly this every day. It would just be very slow and inefficient, and of course like any human being I won't do this exactly (though I am hopeful this will be an "every day, permanent change").
On the PHD website, they of course have many suggestions in how to tweak it for weight loss, which I'm doing. It's basically to cut back on some added fats which means you get a fairly even distribution of carb calories, fat calories, and protein calories.
But that's the thing: this is a health diet, not a weight loss plan, which is why I'm excited about it. I think what I've been doing wrong for years and years is sprinting to short term weight loss goals, and not fixing permanent eating and diet issues. I think having this diet as a base, and tweaking to get my desired results, is a great start for me.
Early results?
Well, I don't weigh in and measure on a daily basis anymore because that is just stupid to do. I now do three week intervals, and I just kicked off a new three week stretch. But the anxiety symptoms are getting better! I went to the theater yesterday and for the first time since before the low carb diet, I felt totally normal. The heart palpitations and other nervous symptoms/panicky feelings are going away as well.
I also don't really feel the bad symptoms of excessive carb intake, like sleepiness, lethargy, etc. Clearly these sort of symptoms are from eating grains, sugars and other refined carbs. For me, the safe starches simply do not have these effects.
Hunger levels are fine, but I do expect to feel more hunger than the average perfect health dieter, since I am tweaking for weight loss.
OK!
CURRENT TOTALS/PROGRESS
To any newcomers, I do not put actual weights and measurements here. I just state what my progress is from the "Start" of the blog. This will remain the same. Alas, the end of 2017 saw some slippage (and to be honest, the progress made last year was short term probably water weight loss crammed in for my vacation anyway).
Weight Loss From Start: -5 lbs (instead of -17, lol).
Inches from chest: -2"
Inches from Waist: -3"
DAILY STEPS (For exercise, I am doing a goal of daily steps. 10k steps is the goal for each day, although I can't promise I'll update the blog each day, but I do plan to update often).
Yesterday: ~6000 steps. Meh. I did get outside for over an hour, but alas, it was with my kids, which meant lots of stopping to referee fights and arguments. This is why "just exercise with your kids!" type advice bugs me. The kids end up sapping my efficiency.
NEW! - Sleep - Since I am now very focused on sleep, I'm going to track this metric
midnight sleep time, awake at 8pm with daylight savings time shift. ~7 hours, which is my normal circadian rhythm, but the cat woke me up at 3pm, so low quality today, as expected.
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