#LCHFProblems

Superhusband and I JUST dropped off a bunch of clothes at Goodwill probably 4 or 5 weeks ago.  I looked over at him a couple days ago and… his brand new pants were already sagging on him!  See, these are the LCHF problems we face.  It’s not what people think.  We don’t face problems finding things to eat at restaurants, we don’t face problems with hunger, we do face problems with eating bad tasting food.  We face problems with shrinking out of our clothes too fast for our wallets to catch up with us.

As you may remember, Superhusband just started LCHF in early June, and he’s already lost just shy of 70 lbs.  He’s also down 4 pants sizes.  I always have my weight loss ticker on my About page, but currently I’m at 124 lbs lost.

So what other LCHF problems do we have?  And By the way, they are all AWESOME problems.

• We don’t look like our driver license pictures (gotta fix that)
• We spend a lot of time telling people how we are losing weight so effortlessly (and referring people to this blog, hi everyone!)
• We’ve become “THAT person” who doesn’t eat halloween candy.
• Along with needing to replace all of our clothing on a fairly regular basis, we had a coat crisis when winter struck, because we didn’t fit in our old ones.  I’m pretty certain both Superhusband AND I can fit in my old jacket.

What sort of LCHF problems have you been dealing with?

Wedding dress and jeans

I thought it would be interesting to try on my wedding dress this week.   After all, very few people weigh less than when they got married, never mind over 60 pounds less, I should really treasure this!     Ladies, you know how much undergarments and structure go into wearing a wedding dress, and they are a necessity to get a dress to actually zip up, and it usually requires at least one other person to help you.  When I was able to zip the dress up MYSELF without sucking in, wearing a corset, etc, I was in heaven.  When I had my husband take pictures of me and I compared them to last April when we got married, I was even more surprised.  What a difference!  Not just in how I look different, but how the dress sits different on me.  While the dress doesn’t fall off me (most of my weight loss is from the waist and below), it is now easily a size too big and at least an inch too long.

If you’re wondering if our best man behind us in the bottom left photo is sexy-dancing with a glass of beer: yes, yes he is.

You can see how the dress was even a teeny bit short on me for the wedding (and I wore flip flops, so shoes didn’t make the difference), and now the dress drags in front.

I also FINALLY got some new jeans that fit.  They are FIVE sizes smaller than what I wore in January!  Just for kicks, I tried them on this morning.

BWAHAHAAAA another person could live in these with me!  I’ll just stick with my new jeans on the right, thank you!

 

70 pounds!

I normally haven’t been calling out my weight loss milestones on here, but I’m really proud of myself!  I’ve only been working at this since January, so I’m definitely making some steady progress.

If you’re on your weight loss journey, please keep this list bookmarked.  It was fun at 60 pounds to announce on facebook “I’ve lost an elephant’s penis!”  (It became hilarious when my parents commented on it.)

1 pound = a Guinea Pig 

1.5 pounds = a dozen Krispy Kreme glazed donuts
2 pounds = a rack of baby back ribs
3 pounds = an average human brain
4 pounds = an ostrich egg
5 pounds = a Chihuahua
6 pounds = a human’s skin
7.5 pounds = an average newborn
8 pounds = a human head
10 pounds= chemical additives an American consumes each year
11 pounds = an average housecat
12 pounds = a Bald Eagle
15 pounds = 10 dozen large eggs
16 pounds = a sperm whale’s brain
20 pounds = an automobile tire
23 pounds = amount of pizza an average American eats in a year
24 pounds = a 3-gallon tub of super premium ice cream
25 pounds = an average 2 year old
30 pounds = amount of cheese an average American eats in a year
33 pounds = a cinder block
36 pounds = a mid-size microwave
40 pounds = a 5-gallon bottle of water or an average human leg
44 pounds = an elephant’s heart
50 pounds = a small bale of hay
55 pounds = a 5000 BTU air conditioner
60 pounds = an elephant’s penis (yep, weights more than his heart!)
66 pounds = fats and oils an average American eats in a year
70 pounds = an Irish Setter
77 pounds = a gold brick
80 pounds = the World’s Largest Ball of Tape
90 pounds = a newborn calf
100 pounds = a 2 month old horse
111 pounds = red meat an average American eats in a year
117 pounds = an average fashion model (and she’s 5’11”)
118 pounds = the complete Encyclopedia Britannica
120 pounds = amount of trash you throw away in a month
130 pounds = a newborn giraffe
138 pounds = potatoes an average American eats in a year
140 pounds = refined sugar an average American eats in a year
144 pounds = an average adult woman (and she’s 5’4”)
150 pounds = the complete Oxford English Dictionary
187 pounds = an average adult man
200 pounds = 2 Bloodhounds
235 pounds = Arnold Schwarzenegger
300 pounds = an average football lineman
400 pounds = a Welsh pony

Please note that I did not create this list.  I’ve seen it posted several times, without being able to find the original author.  If you are aware of the original author, or you are the original author, please let me know so I can add a credit.

LCHF does a body good

(thanks to Alex for her post on The Evils of Wheat for giving me the inspiration for this post)

Some days, I wish I could yell out to the world and say “EAT WHAT I EAT, YOU WILL FEEL SO MUCH BETTER!”  I used to feel SO sick all the time.  I’m not even sure where to start with all this.  I could write a novel on it.

• Since started LCHF, I’ve gone from having at least one migraine a week to having less than one a month, usually when I eat something bad.
• My lymphedema has become much more manageable, and my leg swelling has gone down dramatically.
• My fibromyalgia symptoms (body pain, numbness, brain fog) have nearly disappeared.
• I sleep one less hour a night.
• My resting heart rate went from 80-88 bpm to 60-70 bpm. (and i’m not really doing cardio, so that’s all just from eating well)
• My blood pressure is normal
• I have so much energy!
• My brain works better.  You know when you have a really old computer, and then you buy a new one, and you can suddenly flip between programs super quick?  It’s like that.
• I don’t walk like I have arthritis, because my joints don’t hurt anymore.
• I can’t believe I left this for last, but I’ve lost a crapton of weight.  63 pounds and dropping.  I just bought new clothes, and they are already too big.  Nice problem to have.

It’s so simple, it’s almost silly.  When you cut out the crap (grains, sugar, chemical junk) and eat real food (meat, fish, eggs, cheese, nuts, veggies, berries, butter), you feel AWESOME, and your body works the way it is supposed to!  Why would you want to keep eating grains and sugar when you have to take pills to sustain it?  There is no bread, no candy, no soda that tastes as good as it feels to wake up without pain.  A few years ago, I was in so much pain that I almost filed for disability.  I fought to have the energy for full time employment for so long.  Now, I love to get out and enjoy life, I’m doing great at my job (and love it!), and feel well rested most mornings.

Please… if you haven’t made the switch… try it for two weeks.  If you don’t like it, you can always go back to how you used to eat.

Satiety, Exercise and LCHF

If you were eating the Standard American Diet and then simply create a calorie deficit, chances are you felt deprived and sort of miserable.  Maybe you even added in exercise, but seemed to become MORE hungry but still tried to subsist on salad and chicken breast because you were stronger than this, right?

You know what a diet shouldn’t be?  A game of willpower.  “Normal”-sized people don’t have better willpower than you do.  You don’t have some sort of mental weakness.  You’re suffering from two problems: the wrong diet, and wrong expectations.

Lack of Satiety with Low Fat Diets

First off: What is satiety?  Satiety is not feeling “stuffed”, it’s getting enough of the right kind of food to have a lack of interest in further eating.  It literally means reaching the point of satisfaction.  They always say “don’t go to the grocery store when hungry”, I now have the problem of “don’t go to the grocery store when satiated”, because I never end up buying enough.  My complete disinterest in food is enough for me to not buy nearly enough food for the week.

Satiety is not about how much food is physically in your stomach.  I’d bet you could eat an entire loaf of bread and still be hungry in 2 hours.  Your body can quickly process and store (read: put in fat stores) carbohydrates.  So it’s not the physical pressure on your stomach that causes the satiety… what is it?  It’s the fat!  Fat is fuel.  When your body senses that it has gotten enough fat, that is when it says “okay, i’m good to go for awhile, you can now spend your time thinking about other things”.  This makes biological sense.  You just ate a nice fatty fish, your body feels fueled, instead of forcing you to constantly feel the need to fuel up, it allows you to think about other necessary things, like finding water, reproducing, finding shelter, etc.  If your body is telling you that you are still hungry, it’s because it is!  You didn’t feed it enough fat.

“But I can’t trust my hunger!” you say, “I’ve gained weight with my hunger!”  Yes, you have, on a low fat high carb diet!  Remember that loaf of bread that I mentioned before?  Your body didn’t need ANY of those carbs, it didn’t satisfy it, you still needed to eat something else, and there you went day in and day out eating unnecessary calories.  Calories do count, and empty carbohydrates from sugar and grains are unnecessary.  If you focus on getting 70-80% of your calories from fat, less than 10% from carbohydrates, and get a moderate amount of protein, you reach a perfect point where your hunger perfectly drives your weight loss.

Exercise and Weight Loss

Exercise is really great.  It can increase your endurance, increase lung capacity, increase endorphins, and can be a great way to relieve stress.  I love going on walks and reconnecting with nature.  Once I lose some more weight I’d love to start jogging.

Exercise increases your calorie expenditure, and is therefore going to increase your hunger.  If you are properly following LCHF, you should never ignore your hunger.  LCHF is not a mind game.  If you are hungry, you need to eat.  You have reprogrammed your body and fixed your carbohydrate addiction, so when it is asking for food, it really does need it.  Don’t fight it.  If you fight it, you are going to lose the energy to work out because you will not have given your body the proper fuel.  And please, don’t listen to anyone that says to have to carb load to exercise.  Your body can run (literally) on ketones just fine.

 

For more on both of these concepts, I highly highly HIGHLY recommend reading either of Gary Taubes’ books.  He explains it better than I ever could.  There are lots of websites that explain these concepts as well… if you’d like to point to any of them, please mention them in the comments!

How to measure weight loss progress… without the scale

An old measuring tape (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oh scale… you’re so cruel sometimes.  I eat great, I watch my carbs, I don’t touch even a crumb of bread, and you don’t move a single pound!  Has this ever happened to you?  Of course it has, because you are a human on planet Earth.

Okay, here’s the thing with your body.  There’s a lot of variables.  Even if you’ve lost a lot of fat this week, you may have drank a lot of water too.  You may have a lot of poo in your intestines right now.  You may be swollen.  It’s normal for your weight to vary by several pounds throughout the week.

I knooooow… you wanna see that number go down.  You wanna jump on that scale every morning.  But.. stop it!  At most, you should weigh in once a week.  It would be perfectly acceptable to weigh in biweekly or monthly as well.  And there are many other ways to track your weight loss progress.

Take measurements

I find that about once a month, I have a week that the scale doesn’t move (or goes backwards… that jerk!).  I take that opportunity to update my measurements.  You can track your measurements on several websites, like Sparkpeople, MyFitnessPal, countless apps, heck, you can even just use a spreadsheet program or a notebook.  A measuring tape only costs a couple bucks, and will show you a lot of information.

Take pictures

If you haven’t taken “before” pictures yet, do it.  I forgot to take “before” pictures, and before I knew it I’d already lost 20 pounds.  When I compare my 20 pound weight loss pictures to my now 60 pound weight loss, the difference is stunning.

How do you FEEL?

Even before you see a difference on the scale, in your pictures, in your measurements, once you get into ketosis you are going to FEEL different.  If you don’t have ketone strips to monitor, you can usually tell when you’ve kicked yourself out of ketosis by checking in with yourself on how you feel.  If you start to feel that fog come back, you’ve probably gotten off plan.  LCHF should keep you consistently high energy as long as you are following it correctly and getting enough salt/broth.

How do you monitor your weight loss?

You are a work in progress

I’m not at my goal weight, so while I see that I’ve dropped 57 lbs and moved 6 holes on my belt and can’t seem to buy clothes fast enough to cover my shrinking body, I’m still unhappy with the way I look.  If I can’t find clothes small enough to wear and am forced to wear baggy clothes, I suddenly look 20 pounds heavier and want to cry (and sometimes do).  Losing weight puts you in a bit of an identity crisis… you literally don’t recognize the person you see in the mirror.

I have to remember that I really like this chick in the mirror, though.  Not only has she always been pretty smokin’ hot, but she’s got some great willpower.  She turns down chocolate from her coworker on the daily, she sticks to LCHF even though her husband eats the Standard American Diet and loves his fruit snacks and fritos, and she had the cojones to tell an idiot dietician that they were wrong about what type of diet was right for her.

Even when you stumble, whether it be for a moment, a meal, a day, or a week, or more, it’s okay.  You are a work in progress.  Make a promise to that person in the mirror that you are worth getting back up.  Remember what your goals are: are you trying to lose weight?  Steady your blood sugars?  Tame your PCOS?  Keep up with your kids?  Reclaim fertility?  Find your energy?  Reminding yourself of what your end game is will help you find the strength to continue.

You are a work in progress.   So am I.  Even if you are at your goal weight, I’d bet there are things you wish were different about you… they may be physical, may be emotional, may be mental.  You’ll get there.  Be kind to yourself.

One size does not fit all

Our shirts come in different sizes.  So do our shoes, our hats, our pants.  There are different medication dosages depending on height and weight.  We have classes for students were are both learning disabled as well as gifted in addition to the regular classes.

Why do nutritionists keep trying to fit everyone into the same box?

I’ve been to a nutritionist twice in my life.  Neither were in the same office, but I had an identical experience.  They presented me with a printout of a low-fat, 1200-1500 calorie diet to follow.  They had the sheets printed before they’d even heard my weight struggles or heard my history.  It is the same printout they give to all their patients regardless of their current height or weight or metabolic state.

For me personally, I know that LCHF works great.  I can trust my appetite to not be “just the carbs talking”, I get true satisfaction from my food, I feel incredibly energetic and awake, I’m losing weight very steadily despite eating bacon every day and eating what some would find an alarming amount of cheese, and I’m HAPPY.  My experience on a low fat diet is this: I had to count every single solitary calorie, a lot of days I was hungry and would be sitting very antsy waiting for my next food (reminded me of an addict, which I was!), and I felt mood swingy.  I was still losing weight on low fat but it was a lot of work.  LCHF is almost effortless and is a joy.  I get excited talking about it.  That’s why I created this blog, I’ve shared my joy of losing so much that I wanted to have a central forum.

Now, I can only speak for myself.  There are people out there that have different bodies than me.  Some are happier on paleo, some are happier on low fat, some are happier eating vegan, some are happier living off of bugs and bark.  You have to find what diet works for your body and makes you happy.

Even within a predefined diet, you need to find what works for your body and makes you happy. I was discussing this with my sister who also does LCHF.  We talked about artificial sweeteners.  Now, some people can eat artificial sweeteners all day and it never seems to affect their blood sugar, never kicks them out of ketosis.  Some people have any artificial sweetener and it spikes their blood sugar.  For a lot of people, it depends on the kind of sweetener and how much.  It is trial and error to find out what your body can handle.  Or, of course, you can skip them altogether.  Here’s why all this talk about the way we process artificial sweeteners is important: a lot of prepackaged low carb foods list sugar alcohols as “zero net carbs” but your body may not treat them as such.  That label is trying to make you One Size Fits All, and you may suffer because of it!  You may think you did so good today because you only ate 20 carbs but that innocent “zero carb” meal bar really added another 20 carbs to your day.  That may be enough to kick you out of ketosis.

If you are losing weight on a low fat diet and you’re happy and don’t want to eat low carb, that’s totally fine.  That may be what your body wants.  But if you struggle on low fat, or just never seem to be able to lose any weight no matter how hard you try, stop trying to fit into the nutritionist’s One Size Fits All printout.  Play around with your diet.  And if you have the unfortunate experience of having a doctor who has a problem with low carb, it may be time to get a second opinion.  (Or lie!  They probably won’t be able to tell!)

Happy eating, and be well!

Why go LCHF?

I get asked a LOT of questions from people about my diet.  Low carb isn’t a new thing anymore, but it still raises eyebrows.  I get a lot of “but carbs are so delicious!” and “aren’t you worried about your heart?”.  Yes, I agree that carbs are delicious *pause for dramatic effect*… but 1)that’s sort of the problem, they become an addiction and 2)I don’t need them.    As far as the “heart” worries, I direct them to read “Good Calories, Bad Calories”, and so far no one has made it through the entire book to debate it with me so I’m safe for now 😀

For my low carb creds, let me give you the rundown: I’ve lost 52 lbs.  I’ve got a long way to go.  But that’s a lot of weight.  I keep my carb count under 30 carbs/day.  I’m not afraid of butter, heavy cream, fatty meat, and I’ve been known to sear my steak in bacon lard (try it, it’s amazing).

If you’re reading this and you live in the US and you decide to start going low carb, the first few weeks will feel ridiculous because every ounce of you is going to fight the amount of fat that you’re eating.  You see Subway commercials bragging about how low in fat their subs are, there are fat free salad dressings (loaded with sugar, of course) lining the shelves, and if you can find a single kind of yogurt with more than 2% milkfat on your grocery store shelf i’d be shocked.   If you try to do low carb AND low fat, you are going to want to chew off your own arm.  The fat is your fuel, and it is what satisfies you.  Satiety is what low fat diets lack.  It’s why you can eat 3 cubic feet of salad drowned in fat free dressing and still be starving.  I used to be able to eat a double cheeseburger and a large fry and still be hungry.  Now I can eat the double cheeseburger without the bun and be completely satisfied and not want to eat anything for hours.

So, with time I’m going to post resources, recipes, keep everyone updated on my own weight loss, hopefully get some guest posts in here, and allow the voices of those following LCHF to be heard.

Live well!