Caught Red Handed - 6 pounds of water weight

This weekend, I made some bad choices.  Oh, how the mighty have fallen! 



On Saturday, I made a lower carb chocolate chip cookie, substituting coconut flour for regular flour and erithritol and sugar free pancake syrup for white and brown sugar.  The result was a delicious little cookie (2 dozen of them, in fact) that weighed in at about 2.5 net carbs each.  The recipe was an amazing success.  However, I ate the entire batch by myself - 1 dozen on Saturday and 1 dozen on Sunday. 

 

These cookies are totally induction friendly, as long as you limit yourself to a reasonable serving size.  Learn a lesson from me, though, and avoid this treat if you can't stop at just one or two.  We all have a diet "kryptonite" that is bound to sabotage us if we have it in the house and think to indulge.  My kryptonite appears to be chocolate chip cookies.  This splurge accounted for approximately 62.5 net grams of carbs, spread out over two days.  Not good. 

This mass cookie consumption coincided with "date night in", which we celebrated at home on Saturday evening.  My husband and I split a bottle of prosecco, which resulted in me drinking four flutes of prosecco.  Ouch.  Figure that is another 12-15 grams of carbs added into Saturday's carb count.



Not mine.  Mine was more "rustic".

The next day, I woke up and made 8 pounds of royal icing for my family's annual Gingerbread House Contest, a tradition whereby old and young gather, decorate gingerbread, eat and smack talk for 4 hours.  It is a load of fun.  However, when you consider how much icing I licked off my fingers during that period... eesh. 



I didn't even have the will to do Fitday calculations for Saturday and Sunday.  I could tell by yesterday evening that I was completely bloated by the way that my jeans felt around my middle.  Not so hot.  Recognizing this, I had a cobb salad with chicken for dinner.  A good choice that did nothing to rectify the sins of the weekend.  Oh well, here's to not making things worse!  Hurrah.

Complicating matters, there was a pharmacy mix up on Friday, and I did not get a refill of my blood pressure medicine until Sunday evening.  Though it is a low dose Rx, it does help me get rid of excess water.  Even on a LCHF compliant weekend, if I go without this medicine for a couple days, I'm bound to put on a pound or two. 

Considering that we had breakfast out on Saturday, Saturday dinner was bacon-heavy (chicken wrapped in bacon and roasted - yum), Sunday's lunch was wings and pizza toppings, and we had dinner out on Sunday, I'm sure my salt consumption was higher than usual.  In light of all the other business that transpired over the weekend, this undoubtedly contributed to my water weight gain.

This morning, I weighed myself.  I am up 6 pounds since I last weighed in on Thursday.  I know that if I am strict, I will lose this (mostly) water weight within a few days, but it was unsettling to feel the strain on the waist of my size 14 jeans!  Plus, I am over 200 pounds again, and I had vowed that I would never see these numbers again. 

Frustrating! 

Time to follow my own advice, hit the gym, watch what I eat and take my meds.  I'm figuring that, since I'm sticking to Mark Sisson's 80/20 rule, this weekend probably counts as 10% bad (measured against the entire month of December). 

I started Monday off right, with eggs.  I have a plan to safely navigate the office Christmas potluck lunch today.  Luckily, some sainted woman is contributing a chicken caesar salad to the menu, there appears to be a fried sausage, peppers and onions dish, and I will just avoid any desserts. 

Luckily, no one seems to have noticed my newfound pudginess.  I actually got a few compliments on my outfit and my diet progress as I walked into the office today. 

Ugh.  If they only knew how naughty I was...