Category Health & Weight Loss

Results … Month #5

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Results … Month #5 (Down 33.8 lbs)Results Month 5

Is this a diet that is beginning to fail or do I have a good excuse for such a modest loss in this, the 5th month of the program?

I’m going to claim that I’ve got a good excuse! And I will use that same excuse for being almost two weeks late in posting my weight loss for the previous month. I think I’ve just come through the most harrowing couple of months of my life. I’m not talking the extreme stress that might be the consequence of the loss of a loved one here. Nor am I talking financial ruin, nor any major health issue. What I am talking about is taking one of those life-changing decisions that saw me pick up all the dominoes & just toss them in the air!

In a nutshell, we decided to move to the coast. At the 11th hour, following a vacation, we changed direction & switched coasts! Our house sold quickly. With a short closing. And the maelstrom began. I won’t bore you with all the details but let me share one anecdote from the adventure that that typifies how totally upended our lives have become. En route to our new destination, we left our hotel room to eat. When we returned, the cat was missing! We were stressed enough already, this was just too much. Had housekeeping opened the door to let our moggie escape? After half an hour of searching the room, wandering the lobby and corridors of the hotel, we finally discovered our missing pet. She had, somehow, found a hole in the fabric of the box-spring and made her way inside the box-spring base of the bed!

Amid all the turmoil of fast-closing houses, finding a replacement home with a short closing was a huge challenge. Scheduling movers, cancelling services, signing up for new services, & all the stuff of moving are challenging at the best of times. Doing all that over long distances more so. Having to do everything under the pressure of such short, & tight, deadlines gave me an enduring dose of stress the like of which I had not experienced before. And it’s not over yet.

Needless to say, eating well ceased being a priority. And yes, I’ve eaten all the bad stuff you could imagine over the course of the past six weeks. I’ve had fish ‘n’ chips, Chinese take-out, & I’ve even eaten pizza, bread base & all. I’ve munched cookies & sucked on sweets to keep me alert as I’ve driven through snow storms. I’ve fallen down so many times that I can barely recognize which way is up any more. Mea culpa.

On the bright side, since I started this whole exercise, I have learned a lot about what & how I should be eating. And I seem to have developed a penchant for doing the right thing. Even under such pressure, I have a noticeable bias towards making better food choices. While bread is so easy to eat on the road, I veered towards better eating following every bread binge. While the sugar fixes kept me going on long drives, I tended to avoid sugar the following day. The upshot of it all is that I was down two pounds in a month of some serious stress, some serious dietary abuse, along with a total lack of routine & familiar surroundings.

All in all, given the circumstances, I’d say that my two-pound loss wasn’t all bad for that particular month.

Now, in advance, I’m trying to come up with an excuse for this month’s possibly disastrous outcome! And if our new appliances aren’t delivered before Christmas, it might be a turkey sandwich picnic on the beach for Christmas dinner! 🙂

PS … I carried the scale with me on the drive to our new home. The weight recorded is the weight on December 1st. My intentions were good!

Shameless Self-Promotion!

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Shameless Self-Promotion!For a Man or a Dog

Just in time for Christmas & the holiday season, I cut the price of my book … “For a Man or a Dog” on Amazon. I’ve read it & I think it’s great. I highly recommend it! 🙂 🙂 🙂

About one third of the stories in this collection should give you a chuckle, another third will bore you to death, and the rest fall somewhere in between! Hey, I might as well be honest but I still think it’s worth the price for the good ones. Go get yourself a copy. Or pick one up as a stocking-stuffer for that friend with an interest in Ireland & things Irish. If you do get around to reading it, please review it on Amazon. Unless you think it’s awful. In which case, just skip that step!

For those who follow my weight-loss exploits, some of the stories might give you an inkling as to why I got fat in the first place! My Mammy’s Irish food was really good! 🙂

The Kindle version is down around 60% & the paperback is down around 20%. Wish I could do more with the paperback but the printing cost is the primary driver on that one. The new pricing is in effect on all the regional Amazon sites (Americas, EU & Asia) that it’s available on.

I also clicked a box for “other distribution”. I have no idea what happens with that but Amazon says it makes the hard copy version available for purchase by libraries & bookstores. Needless to say, there aren’t a line-up of libraries & book stores that were waiting for me to do this but if you happen to know of a library or a book store that might want to carry a copy of something with an Irish interest, could you let them know.

And could you please share this post with your friends for me. Especially those with Irish connections, or those that might have a trip to Ireland on their bucket list.

Thank you.

Paul

Surviving a Bad Diet Week

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Surviving a Bad Diet Week

Lobster Poutine

Lobster Poutine!

I was travelling all last week. I’m usually better prepared for eating well on the road but the stress overload on this particular trip was way above & beyond anything I would consider normal. I won’t dwell on the details now, for fear that I’ll bring on another panic attack! But believe me, this was a heavy-duty week. When I tell you that the healthiest meal I had all week was a lobster poutine, you might get some idea of just how poorly my diet fared.

Don’t know what poutine is? Get ready to have your mind blown!

It’s a dish that originated in the province of Quebec. The basic version consists of French fries, loaded up with a big fistful of cheese curds. And all of that gets slathered in gravy. Gravy so hot that the curds melt into the matrix of fries! You can nuance the dish by adding all sorts of other ingredients. I like chunks of German or Hungarian sausage myself. But you can add pepperoni, perhaps with a dash of Parmesan cheese & some chili flakes, to give it a little Italian pizza-like flair. The lobster poutine I’d never had before though. And, despondent though I felt about how I was eating all week, I just couldn’t resist the temptation. Once again, I was so enamored of the dish before me, that I attacked it before remembering to grab of a shot of it. Apologies!

I didn’t get home ’til almost midnight on Saturday. I was so exhausted on Sunday that I was couch-bound all day. The scale mocked me that morning, I was up 5.6 lbs after my week of debauchery. Horror! I stuck with a low-carb regimen through the day, on Sunday. Though I did have some baked beans. And some mustard pickle. And that cherry ice cream. With dark chocolate thrown in for good measure. Please … cut me some slack, I was hurting!

Monday showed a drop of 4 lbs. Phew! The big gain was likely water retention from all that starchy eating the previous week. In any case, I’m not quite back on track yet. And I’m looking at a pretty daunting schedule between now & Christmas. I’m really not sure if I’m telling you all this in anticipation of failure over the coming weeks. Or maybe I’m preparing to test myself, and the robustness of the program, during such trying times. Whichever it might be, it’s going to be an interesting time. Please send me a word of encouragement here and there. I could use the help!

And if you’ve never had poutine before … give it a try!

Results … Month #4

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Results … Month #4

This is big. No … it’s huge. Results Month 4

And I’m now a little less huge after 4 months of this DIY hybrid diet!

Only avid students of diet might understand how big this is but let me see if I can explain.

This past month, the 4th month of my weight loss attempt, probably qualifies as one of my top 10 more stressful months. The physiological response to stress inhibits weight loss. And as most overweight people can attest, one of our typical responses to stress is to seek comfort in food. And I did that. I lost weight while under a burden of stress, and I was stress-eating. But I still lost some weight. If I wasn’t so stressed, this would be cause for great jubilation and celebration. Instead, this morning, I am simply grateful.

The other big thing about this is that I lost weight in the 4th month of a diet. Many of my previous weight loss efforts resulted in a plateau far earlier in the attempt. More often than not, the first plateau hits after about two months. Many times, this is justification for bailing on the diet. On those fewer occasions where I successfully made it past the 2 month mark, there is less doubt that a stall would have occurred in the 3rd month. And it was pretty much guaranteed to have happened by the 4th month. But not this time. And I’m not being cocky here, quite the contrary, I’m now stressed about when that stall will finally happen!

My regular reader might attribute this month’s loss to that 4 day fast I did during the 2nd week of the month, but that’s not the case. Whether it was stress, or a reaction to the extended fast, I pretty much binged ’til I regained almost all the losses resulting from that fast. And I then spent the rest of the month getting to this morning’s weight. Which is still slightly above my post-fast weight. I’m not discounting the value of an extended fast for weight loss. But I think I’ll wait for a more serene month before attempting another!

I should also disclose that I didn’t eat particularly well this month. There were more French fry days than I would have liked. I was adding more chocolate, much of it not the dark stuff, to my home made ice cream. And there were more ice cream days than a better planned month might have had. My body was screaming out for something green and I think I had my first salad of the month yesterday! Looking for the positives in all this chaos, the program seems pretty robust. If I can lose weight during times like this, while eating that poorly, this might be a good diet for me. Real life carries on, regardless of our weight loss goals. And we need a diet that can handle real life.

I’m not taking it to the bank yet though, who knows what pitfalls lie ahead. I’m expecting November to match the past month for having to worry about things. Hopefully, some solutions will fall into to place and all will turn out well. But if not, I hope the diet continues to do its thing for the next month regardless.

Wish me luck!

Speaking of luck & diet … I don’t think I’ll go Trick-or-Treating tonight! 🙂

And a Happy Halloween to all!

Waste Not … Want Not

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Waste Not … Want Not

Potato Bread

To Eat … or Not to Eat!

The phrase “Waste Not … Want Not” goes back centuries. But it is burned into my memory as one of my mother’s favourite phrases, from my earliest years. I loved my Ma but, and despite that, I like to blame her for so many childhood problems that have carried over to my adult life!

One of my biggest challenges, at least while trying to lose weight, is reminding myself that I am not a garbage disposal unit. In our house, I am like the fridge vacuum cleaner! I dedicate my life to sucking up everyone else’s leftovers. I scrutinize and smell those last few slices of deli meat. I check that piece of aged cheddar for green spots. I peel the outer layers off that limp half-head of cabbage. You name it, I will try to salvage it. Real leftovers are a no-brainer! Potatoes, veggies, meat, lasagna, that chicken curry from two days ago … all great things to toss in a hot, well-oiled, frying pan.

The problem is that these leftovers aren’t always in line with my diet-du-jour. Regardless, I somehow manage to talk myself into believing that those few layers of pasta in that leftover lasagna are, by some miracle of cooking and cooling, low-carb. I just cannot overcome my desire to not waste “good food”, and I feel compelled to eat it. Ma’s brainwashing has stood the test of time. Combine this phase with her other much-proffered one about “cleaning your plate” and I’m done for.

All that said, I am encouraged. I am now nearing the end of the 4th month on my new weight-loss program. During the course of this week, I enjoyed a really nice work lunch, in the company of some great people. We went to a Hungarian restaurant. Despite my good intentions to order the diet-friendly debrecener sausage, with sauerkraut, I found myself having the beef stroganoff. With spätzle! That eastern European pasta stuff that is so good. Then there was this lángos thing on the menu. I hadn’t tried lángos before. It is a deep-fried potato bread. Who knew such a wonderful food even existed? Unless you’re Hungarian of course! To alleviate my guilt, two of us ordered one of those to share. It was hot, thick, oily, and delicious. And it was big. The darn things overhung the dinner plate it was served on by two inches on either side!

My encouragement comes from the fact that I left most of the spätzle on the plate. And I only ate a hand-sized (palm & fingers!) piece of the lángos. Leaving food on the plate? This is new for me. Is it possible that my natural control systems are beginning to work again? And if that’s the case, my new weight-loss program might be working better already than I could have imagined. Maybe one day soon, I will be able to pass on the fridge leftovers too.

That would be quite the victory!

Is there a fridge vacuum in your house?