LCHF and Primal Guest Posts Welcome...

Anyone interested in doing some guest blogging this month?  I could sure use the help.  I anticipate that my posting is going to slow down for the next couple of weeks.

My daughter needs yet another surgery, and it will probably happen this week/early next week. The surgery is to correct a portion of her bile duct that was damaged when she had a large tumor removed from her abdomen in May.  Recovery may be a couple of weeks or so.

She is currently hospitalized, and has been so for a bit.  I am working while my husband primarily stays with her at the hospital.  So, for me there is a lot of shuttling around (work, hospital, home), doing laundry, and just generally being discombobulated and tired all of the time. 

Our regular life is on pause for a while.  I am certainly not doing any cooking these days, nor any kitchen experimentation.  We are essentially living on takeout and cafeteria food right now, tossed together with whatever homemade stuff I can coerce my family to bring to the hospital.  It is getting a bit tiring. 

To get my fiber, I've taken to buying bags of prepped veggies, like broccoli and cauliflower, and just eating the veggies raw with creamy dips.  I really like T. Marzetti's Southwestern Ranch dip.  It is soooooo good with raw broccoli.  I am thinking it would be a killer dressing for a creamy coleslaw.

If you want to try T. Marzetti's Southwestern Ranch dip, just make sure that you buy the full fat version, as the nutritional profile is more appropriate for LCHF than the low fat version.  This dip can probably be found in the refrigerated section near/in your produce aisle.

Notably, I went onto T. Marzett's website to link to the nutritional information for this product and was surprised/concerned to find that the full fat version is no longer featured on their website.  Hopefully this doesn't mean that they are phasing it out in favor of its low fat cousin.  That would be a serious bummer.

Fit Day

I just started a Fit Day account.  Check out my public profile.  I've gone back and inputted my weights since starting LCHF in January 2011.  So far, Fit Day seems pretty cool.  

There are definitely some positives, i.e., I like seeing my weight loss charted on a graph.  What can I say, I'm a visual type of girl ;)

I do have some reservations about their nutrition tracker.  I had chicken soup today for lunch. Fit Day's "chicken soup" recipe that they analyzed for nutrition contains about 10 grams of carbs per cup.  Considering that my soup was mostly broth, chicken, and some veggies (no rice, noodles or potatoes), I'm pretty positive that my carb intake from the soup was quite minimal. 

So, the nutrition tracking of homemade foods is probably going to be iffy.  Unless you are eating completely whole foods (1 cup of raw broccoli) or major brand food items (1 cup of Cheerios), the carb counts in your food are going to be off, maybe even way off. 

 

I will investigate how to get around this and report back... 

Get thee to the doctor!

I've been doing a lot of research on PCOS and "estrogen dominance" and "progesterone deficiency".  Turns out having PCOS causes you to have a lot of estrogen running around in your body.  Too much estrogen and not enough progesterone tends to make you fat around the midsection, hairy, moody, headachey, etc.  As if these symptoms weren't bad enough, having such an estrogen imbalance can apparently increase your likelihood of heart disease and breast cancer.  (And, let me be the first to tell you, having PCOS can make you infertile).  If these symptoms sound familiar, consider getting yourself to your MD for a check up, and have them run some blood tests on you. 

Hey - I'm not a doctor, but I believe that if you feel like crap you should get yourself to the MD and find out what's going on. 

I know a lot of people who prefer to stick their heads in the sand and just live with their symptoms.  An example: I have an Aunt Pam.  She is one of my mother's sisters.  After my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer (for the second time) in 2008, she had genetic testing performed to determine whether she had a gene abnormality on BRCA1 or BRCA2 (these are human tumor suppressor genes - women and MEN who have an abnormality in these genes are much more likely to get breast, ovarian, and other types of cancer than the general population).  Mom had a deletion on her BRCA 2 gene - she had hereditary breast cancer.  With the exception of my Aunt Pam, my mom's children and her brothers and sisters all were tested.  We were all negative, thank God.  My Aunt Pam didn't show up for her appointment, she didn't reschedule, and she has never been tested, to this day.  Aunt Pam has two biological children, each of whom would also have benefitted from knowing whether their mom carried such a gene abnormality (because that would mean they have a 50% chance of having the same gene abnormality...the same elevated risks). 

My mom died last August, at age 54.  If she had had the benefit of a "heads up" ten years earlier, maybe she would still be alive today.  (Case in point: Christina Applegate).  To squander the opportunity to learn more about your own health, when it could provoke action that could save, extend and/or improve your life (and the lives of your loved ones), is tragic!

We only have this one life and this one body.  We should take care of them the best we can.  You're never too old to start taking care of yourself for the first time in your life.  Hey, I'm 31.  I'm obese and not that healthy at the moment.  But, I'm working on it, and my life is improving as a result.  There is no shame in being a work in progress.  There is no shame in investing in YOU!

Saturday 3/5/11 - gym, cookery, goin' out!

So, this morning I got up and went to the gym.  I did week 1, day 1 of the race training and boy, was it hard.  Its not my cardio, either - jogging is physically uncomfortable!  My feet hurt.  What's that all about?  Maybe I need to get some new sneaks, or put in some arch supports.  I'm going to go to the runner's shoe store near me and see what they say about it.  Hope they're open on a Sunday.  I'll hit it on my way to the office tomorrow.

I spent a lot of the day cooking.  I did cupcake-sized mini quiches with bacon, broccoli and cheddar for breakfast this week.  The recipe made 12 quiches, which I froze.  I also made some bigos - polish "hunter's style" sauerkraut with pork, kielbasa and bacon.  It is so good, and sooo perfect for a low carb diet, but you gotta like cabbage (and I do!!).  I've also got some of my controversial chili, which I defrosted and will incorporate into my diet this week.  I would have left it alone, but my dad had a hankering for a chili dog, and I could only defrost the entire thing of chili, not bits at a time, so there you go...

Tonight I'm going out for my aunt's 40th birthday.  Yahoo. I went shopping yesterday, and bought myself a new skirt - size 16 regular.  That's down from an 18W, and its freaking fantastic.  I'm wearing it out tonight with some boots and a black tee.  I'll be very monochromatic.  Maybe even a little goth.  We're going to bar for a drag show, but before that, we're going to a totally normal restaurant for dinner...  so I can't go all out!!

Disclosure!  I plan on having 1-2 drinks tonight.  I will be very careful with what I eat, and I'll stick with low-carb drinks, too.  But there will be alcohol involved!

Goals and looking back - oh God.

One thing that I really liked about the Atkins Bulletin Board, is that the people frequently post their goals and "mini-goals", and celebrate for every 10 pounds lost to keep up the excitement and interest.  I think that is a great idea, so I have added a "Goals" section to my home page, to keep track of my goals.  I am only .5 pounds away from 220, so I am really excited to make that goal.  It means a lot to me.

Prior to this making this lifestyle change, I'd been stuck between 225-236 for a long time. 

I took some time to look back at my history of being overweight:

• I don't think that I got chubby until I was in the 2nd grade, because that is when the teasing started. 
• I remember weighing 130 pounds in the 3rd grade, and being 5'2". 
• After that, its a blur until I get to freshman year of high school in 1994, and I'm just under 200 pounds. 
• In the Summer of 1995, I joined Weight Watchers and lost about 25 pounds, and had a weight of about 175 or so and looked really good.  I went back to school in the fall, and remember that this jerk from French class, who had teased me mercilessly the year before, was suddenly nice to me and told me how "fantastic" I looked. 
• Then, a romantic relationship ended badly, and I gained that lost weight back in a heart beat.  I maintained at 190-195 from my sophomore year of high school in 1995 through October 2001, the beginning of my senior year of college.
• In October 2001, I was sick and lost a ton of weight in about 3 weeks.  I weighed 175 and was a size 10-12 and thought I looked pretty phenomenal.  That came back by the following summer (2002).
• I  started law school in 2002 at about 195 or so. 
• I ended law school in 2005 at 236.
• I weighed 236 when I got married in 2005.
• I weighed 236 when I got pregnant in 2006, was up to 240-something during my pregnancy, and after I had my daughter in 2007, I weighed 224. 
• I ballooned back up to 236 by Summer 2008, then managed, during that summer, by way of diet (frozen diet lunches and yogurt every day), to get down to 217 at my lowest in August 2008. 
• That didn't last for very long, and I slowly (over the course of a year) gained it back. 
• My weight, since about August 2009, has fluctuated within the range of 225-236 pounds.  When I started this diet in January 2011, I weighed 231.5. 
• I am currently at 220.5,  as of 2/28/11, which is as thin as I've been in a while. 

It is a little shocking to realize that I can never remember having weighed my goal weight of 150.  Going back, I can calculate that I was probably at 150 or so in the 5th grade, but I have no real recollection.  I was a size 14 in middle school, so I was probably at 180+ by the 7th grade. 

So, when I reach my goal weight of 150 pounds, I will probably be the thinnest I have been since I was 10 or 11 years old, and I'll be about 4" taller. 

Isn't that shocking?  Isn't it sad? 

I hated being the fat girl.  It really has been my "label" since I was a young girl.  It doesn't matter that I have always had positive characteristics that I (or others) could use to describe myself, too - like smart, funny, beautiful, kind or successful.  I never used them until adulthood.  I just listened to my mom tell me these things over and over, and I never really believed her.  Thank God I had her to keep up that refrain when I was at my most vulnerable and self-loathing - during my adolescent years - because it somehow, eventually got through, and I am a healthy-minded adult.  Just makes me realize one more thing that mom did for me that I never got a chance to thank her for.  I hope that she knew, before she died, that all of the laudatory things anyone can say about me are nearly 100% attributable to her hard work and excellent example.  I wouldn't have been the person I am today if it hadn't been for her.

Sad.  Now I miss her, and have cried my eye makeup off while at work.  Fantastic.  No more blogging about this stuff during lunch.