So I’m trying to be better about eating. I’m so damn useless about that. Over halfway through the day, almost to dinner, and I finally feed myself. Tired of it. It certainly wasn’t helping with weight loss or staying on the wagon. Accordingly, I fixed myself a nice breakfast today.
Then I remembered I hadn’t done my “official” weigh-in. Fuck!
OK. It was around 211. Yes, my weight went up. But no picture for the visual record.
Hopefully I’ll have my stuff better together next time. I’m pretty much in Induction and back in ketosis, so I might even do a daily thing for this next week for the fun of it.
Recently I complained that registered dietitians (RDs) are attempting to sew up a monopoly on dietary advising all over the United States. The reason I complained about this is I perceive we are judging the value of the advice given based on the credentials of the person giving the advice rather than upon the scientific validity of the advice given. This is certainly an efficient means of giving dietary advice but is not what I would call an effective means, since all you need is a corrupt certifying agency–or, at best, one populated by ignorant individuals–and every single dietitian certified by that agency would then give incorrect advice, which of course would lead to more and more sicker and sicker patients. Which we are sort of seeing happening now.
In this scenario, if you happened to draw a dietitian who gave good advice it would be despite the certification system, not because of it–and we are right back to square one, where the advice given is independent of any efforts by the certification system to regulate it. Again, what matters is what is said, not who is saying it.
These two articles from Fitday illustrate that it is possible to obtain both bad and good advice from the exact same profession. My point is that if you go on certification only, you have no way of knowing which is which.
Smart Substitutions: Sweet Cravings
This is good advice as far as it goes. I could quibble about the ice cream example because if you made dairy ice cream in your kitchen with real cream and full-fat milk but you used a non-nutritive sweetener (assuming, of course, no dairy sensitivity), that is more nutritious than most dietitians will credit. (You’ll see what I mean when I discuss the second article.) And of course if you’re going to eat sweet anything and are curious if it will hurt you, you should check your blood sugar after eating it. My understanding based on what I’ve read up til now is that if your blood sugar ever goes over 140 mg/dl, even an hour after a meal, you’re doing something wrong and need to re-evaluate. 140 mg/dl is the threshold after which you start seeing real sugar-related damage. This of course refers to glucose; fructose is a whole ‘nother monster entirely and, if you are eating the standard American diet and avoid egg yolks and beef liver (important sources of choline to keep your own liver healthy), you should also avoid as much fructose as humanly possible. But if you manage most of that by eliminating table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup from your diet, a little fruit now and again won’t kill you. On the whole, if you do what Ms. Goff is advising here, you won’t exactly be much worse for wear. Very not bad.
5 Common Foods That Are Ruining Your Waistline
Ms. Li, on the other hand, has batshit insanely unhealthy obsessions with fat and calories.
Almost every additive contributes even more calories and fat.
I usually prefer less fat in my diet, compared to calories, but others may have differing opinions.
Most granola cereals are high in fat and sugar.
However, crackers can be deceiving. Some popular brands have a buttery flavor that adds on the fat and calories.
While these are a quick and easy snack, they are loaded with sodium, fat, and calories.
The problem is that so many different kinds means varying amounts of fat, sugar, and calories.
Yogurt drinks are packed with fruit and calcium – but also calories, sugar, and fat.
A long time ago, this may have been true, but smoothies have become part of an elaborate industry, which usually means more calories.
This adds a ton of calories and fat.
Apparently no one ever told this moron (or her compatriots who think exactly like her, which comprise far too great a percentage of the dietetics field) that 1800 calories is the semistarvation threshold, and that 1000 calories or less per day constitutes starvation. At least, I seem to have picked up someplace that these were official designations, though I’m having trouble finding them again now (may have been in a book). Any road, Ancel Keys once did a research study about the consequences of semistarvation and he wasn’t too enthused about his findings. (I don’t like the shenanigans he pulled with his cholesterol “research”, but this one was totally in-house and done on live people.) To tell someone to cut calories simply for the sake of cutting calories is irresponsible to the extreme. I suppose she then turns around and yells at her clients when they binge because they have been ravenous as a result of her advice–something Ancel Keys also observed but, unlike the modern dietitian, understood that it was a natural and inevitable response.
Ms. Li also makes no effort whatsoever to distinguish between the various types of dietary fat, which means she’s not even current with mainstream thinking on the topic. You would think she’d try to steer people toward consumption of monounsaturated fat at the very least. Oh no. All fat is bad in her world. She hasn’t even got her story straight on skim and lowfat milk versus full-fat milk. Most dietitians will tell you that milk with the fat removed has more calcium in it because you’re pretty much just drinking whey (with the casein protein still in suspension), which is where most of milk’s calcium is located. But quite aside from that, it doesn’t matter how much calcium is in your milk if you can’t do shit with it because you’re not drinking the fat along with it that would help you absorb the calcium. You might as well be drinking chalk water for all the good it’s doing you. Or has no one noticed that the gender most likely to drink skim milk is also the gender most plagued with osteoporosis? Probably coincidence–but what if it’s not?
Possibility the first: Ms. Li has no fucking idea what she’s talking about, which begs the question of what exactly the dietitian industry is supposed to be certifying. Possibility the second: Ms. Li believes all these details are over the heads of most of her clientele. Which would mean she believes you are stupid. Do you really want your only option for dietary advice to be someone who believes you have all the IQ of a dried-out turnip, and who expects you to eat like one? Or, worse: someone who has no fucking idea what they are doing at all, so that you’re paying them good money for essentially nothing, and won’t have improved health to show for it?
I think you know the answer to those questions better than I do.
I’m kind of surprised to see this on the scale today.
 18 February 2012 at 208.5 pounds Did you know that wheat makes me sleepy soon after eating it and, if I continue eating it, also makes me get less out of my sleep and wake up groggy and feel like crap with no energy all day long? Seriously. And it’s definitely the wheat. No doubt about that. If I eat enough carbs I can count on weight gain but the threshold seems to be lower for wheat than for any other carb.
It is time for me to turn into Cast-Iron Bitch in this household.
I cause myself enough trouble with temptation and succumbing to it. Going without food over half the day doesn’t help me either. It just makes me more inclined to be naughty*.
But when we’ve established that both adults in the household have trouble with wheat intolerance, there’s no reason to bring it into the house for the child. When both a child’s parents have trouble with a food, it stands to reason the kid’s going to have trouble too. And she demonstrates this. She had a much greater amount of wheat than usual the other day (normally we limit it to Ezekiel bread if at all), and she went into meltdown by early evening. She is normally well-behaved but boisterous; how well I tolerate her baseline depends on how well I’m eating. But if she eats wheat or a lot of sugar or a surplus of food dyes, all her self-control goes right out the window.
Today her dad made her breakfast. A baked apple with dates and nuts. She’s still hungry. I’ve been at the point for a while that I’m ready to ban him from the kitchen and this just makes me more determined. If he can’t be bothered to think about what the food he gives her is doing to her then to hell with him. He can keep his junk food stash upstairs in his room, eat what I give him and stay the fuck out of the kitchen otherwise. This is serious. All our health is riding on this, and all he can do is fuck around. Either he gives her things that are not good for her, or he gives her strange things she doesn’t like. Last thing we need on top of poison junk is a dysfunctional relationship with eating.
The catch-22 is that when I’ve been eating badly or not enough, I feel like shit and don’t have enough energy to keep up with that kitchen and with food prep. But if I don’t eat well and often enough, my energy will be shit and so I will keep eating badly and not enough.
And this is why, while I will lament the fact that children eat so badly now, I do not judge parents who have fat kids (Thea’s not fat, she just reacts badly to the worst of what we could possibly feed her). It’s HARD to turn yourself around and provide better food choices. It pretty much REQUIRES cooking and, if you really want to make sure your kid turns out well, a certain amount of meal-planning too. And those behaviors depend on a whole slew of other habits, such as keeping an organized house and personal routine, that most people anymore have a lot of trouble mastering. Probably including you, so if you’re the type to bitch about fat kids, just think about that a while.
And this probably should have all been a separate post, but I will sometimes run on. And now I gotta go because it’s the other adult in the house’s birthday and I have shit to do to get ready for tonight. Have fun, kids.
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*”Stupid” might be a better word. It doesn’t matter whether I’m breaking someone else’s rule. What does matter is that I KNOW wheat damages me, so the LOGICAL thing to do would be to avoid it all the time. Every time I hear some idiot say “everything in moderation” I want to slap them. Live in my body and eat nothing but wheat products for a week and then tell me how fucking awesome whole grains are. Asshole.
Someone on my fan page posed me the following today:
I just posted a metabolism question over at Mark’s Daily Apple. I have been extremely mistaken about carbs/protein/fat. Where is a good place to get accurate information about how these nutrients are used in the body? My understanding has been that if you limit the carbs, your body uses consumed fat and then body fat for fuel. This is how *I’ve* been losing weight, but now I’ve read that the body *does* store fat as fat. What’s up with this?
Short answer on the “where to find reliable info” question: Accurate information may be found in either of Gary Taubes’s books on the subject. It is my understanding that Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It updates some of the information from Good Calories, Bad Calories , but if you don’t want to sludge through and try to figure out what Taubes updated, stick with WWGF.
That said, here’s a longer answer. Hope it helps.
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Thought about doing a weigh-in today.
Decided not to do the weigh-in today.
I got on the scales yesterday while fully clothed and it came out to about 212 and a half, in case anyone wants a ballpark. I know you don’t really care, but there you go. Close enough for government work.
Ever since the surgery* last month, I’ve been mediocre to borderline rotten with the diet. I was pretty good, even then, with keeping off the wheat until about the first week in February, and then I caved and had all kinds of noodles at Noodles & Co. Hey Noodles: If I haven’t lost my mind and totally missed the fact that you let people use any noodles with any toppings, would you please do that, so next time I get stupid I can ask for rice noodles to go with the mac and cheese toppings? Thanks. Love ya much.
I haven’t had my migraines come back yet but I was naughty other times besides that one, since then. That said, I seem to have broken whatever was making me have migraines almost every other day for about two or three months straight. I exaggerate only slightly. And if I don’t watch it they’ll come back and bring their fucking friends. It’ll be an icepick party in my brain and I will take it out on all of YOU, internets. Look out below.
I’m getting that telltale water gain, at least, which I can tell because my fingers get puffier. Early warning system, bad scene, time to pay attention again.
Meanwhile…
…What the everloving fuck is wrong with people lately?
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I’m about this close to putting WordPress through the nearest wall. Not major shit, but it dumps in my lap right when everyone in the household except the cats is annoying me–and give the little fuckers time, they’ll think of something.
Just because, here was my weigh-in on the first.
 01 February 2012 at 209.5 pounds I was going to do up a whole beginning-of-month thang with the weigh-in and pictures and stuff but I don’t think that, as an over-200-pound person, five and a half pounds is going to look all that different on me. I think I might do photo updates every ten or twenty pounds instead, rather than going by calendar date. More likely twenty. Also, I was way busy on the first because the other adult in the house’s tax refund came in and we’ve kind of been doing the Kid In A Candy Store routine. (He put some aside in savings and hopefully we won’t spend it all.) Which has meant going out a lot. I don’t get how people can be constantly on the go with work and school and after-school activities and a social life. I have been more or less alone* for so long that my tolerance to that level of stimulation has declined alarmingly. What you guys pass off as normal would leave me in the fetal position on my bed, either sobbing my eyes out or catatonic. Alas.
Anyway. Today’s weigh-in:
 04 February 2012 at 208 pounds I have actually been quite naughty since the surgery. Relatively speaking. (I would still put your average SAD eater or low-fat dieter to shame.) I suspect a lot of my frayed-nerves thing today is me trying to readjust to a lower-carb intake. It ain’t pretty. I even went to Noodles & Co Thursday with my daughter–and I could have gotten a salad. I really could have. But I was craving noodles in the worst way. Right down to envisioning what it would feel like to bite into them. Sorry about the visual. I regretted it immediately afterward. I got sleepy. You know all that crap that was circulating on the Internet after this last Thanksgiving where they were saying it was the carbs making people sleepy rather than the tryptophan? IT’S TRUE, YO. I’ve had this happen to me twice now that I’ve noticed, and I’m sure it’s happened way more times than that but my tiredness got blamed on something else.
And part of the trouble has, as usual, been the kitchen. I am so angry about that. I am actually fairly fucking fed up with telling the other adult in the house anything because he doesn’t listen. It’s bad enough I only have two people to talk to in my entire damn offline life, and one of them’s not even ten yet. But to have the adult blatantly not listen to stuff I have told him over and over has got me borderline homicidal and you better bet I would attempt to use the He Needed Killin defense in court. Watch your cooking temperature so the grease doesn’t spatter everywhere, asshole. Use a plate as your spoon or spatula rest, fuckstick. Don’t stack plates on top of glasses on the countertop, rectum-breath. What the FUCK is wrong with people? I’M the one who has to chisel all this shit up and our kid is the one who has to live with the mess til I get around to it.
And it’s really tough cooking anything when every dish that gets used gets given its own place on the countertop rather than it all stacked in a reasonable way (i.e., NOT plate on top of glasses–bearing a startling resemblance to the Space Needle, only lots less safe). So you start taking shortcuts for meals and next thing you know you’re backsliding.
I’m glad wheat and sugar make me feel like shit. I still occasionally indulge the wheat, but I have to be SO good about both now because they are self-correcting. I have that going for me, at least.
Oh, and because someone on my Facebook page wasn’t sure: I’m off all the meds now. Done with the antibiotic, done with the painkillers and I have much less numbness in my tongue now. We’re playing fuck-me games with me getting my followup appointment, but my surgeon does a lot of cancer surgeries and so I don’t begrudge him. One of these days I’ll get in and that’s all I care about. It’s just followup anyway. No big.
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*Technically I am not alone but when the people you see have been the same two people every day for six or seven years and you’ve been going to a homeschool gym class with your daughter for about four or five months and only NOW has anyone bothered starting a conversation with you (and you’ve tried starting them instead and it’s been pretty much fruitless in terms of interaction away from the class), it feels pretty isolating.
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