The Low-Carb Curmudgeon

All right, fine, here’s my opinion

Dana Seilhan — Thu, 17 May 2012 02:27:35 +0000

I can never seem to put across a simple idea and just get it over with. This is probably one reason I have never given up swearing; because it is simplified language, it forces me to state my thoughts in simplified ways*. Anyway, so the following is not a simple one-sentence opinion about the whole Jack Kruse, MD affair, but at least it’ll be a short post. Here goes.

Dear faileo community:

1. It is possible to hack a Facebook account. Happens every day. Has happened to people on my friends list, in fact, NOT that this statement constitutes an engraved invitation to any random assholes out there.

2. Someone has already demonstrated it is possible to start a spoof Twitter account.

3. Screenshots can be faked.

4. People have disciplinary measures taken against them every day for minor infractions (and sometimes for zero infractions, but falsely accused) while people who pull major bullshit get let off the hook again and again. In the field of medicine, this is why we have malpractice lawsuits; too many doctors are still licensed who do not deserve it. I can’t even be convinced that the disciplinary listing I saw for a Dr. JOHN Kruse was the one and the same Dr. Kruse we are all discussing here. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. He still has his MD, he still has his license. He could be one of those aforementioned who is guilty of major bullshit–but then again, maybe he’s not. I don’t know, and you don’t either. Until you PERSONALLY WITNESS something, you will continue to not know. And you can proclaim your superior knowledge and intellect to any credulous sheep you like over the next ten to twenty years and rake in the Facebook fans and the ad revenue. You’re still a pissy-faced little know-nothing who likes to slander people with whom you disagree. I’d be threatening to sue you too, if I had Dr. Kruse’s lawyer money and a fan club like you.

5. Speaking of which: It’s perfectly acceptable to get outraged and angry and threaten consequences when someone calls the FBI on your ass on the basis of a false report and humiliates you in front of a few hundred of your friends and admirers. Didn’t you know? Don’t you remember how the faileo community responded to Gary Taubes daring to argue with Saint Guyenet at the Ancestral Health Symposium last year? That was just a heated argument. No authorities were called; no one’s freedom or future was threatened. Now ask yourself how you’d react in Kruse’s shoes. You’d be crying like little assholes and calling your mommies and you fucking know it.

I’m afraid I put Dr. Kruse a bit on the defensive recently, and I’m probably putting him even more so on it now, in some ways, and I hate knowing that. He’s welcome to read this blog, crappy as it is; he’s welcome to stay on my Facebook page if he likes. But even if he’s truly up to the sort of fuckery that I read about today with allegedly posting up fake pictures of his back, fact remains he’s helping people. And some of the people he’s helping are people that you fucking faileos would turn away because fat people are such a drag, man! Ew!

Don’t bother looking at me like that. There are reasons I don’t read most of you anymore, and you’ve done one bang-up job demonstrating nearly all of them in the past two weeks.

Go to hell. Which ain’t Paleo either, come to think of it.

No love,
Me.

—–
*Naturally, this is not the only reason I swear. If there were about one billion fewer assholes in the world, that’d eliminate another reason. Also not the only one. I could go on all night about said topic, but this post is not about my gutter mouth. It just highlights it. Sorry about that… only, not.

The Kruse cruise, cold, and carbs

Dana Seilhan — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:00:42 +0000

This is a long post. I warned you. But it’s not quite what you think.

So Jimmy Moore’s annual Low-Carb Cruise has ended for the year. This year’s was spiced up a bit by Dr. Jack Kruse being removed from the ship after a rogue tweet on Twitter sent the FBI after him to search his cabin, himself and his belongings and, spooked by the whole exchange (or for whatever reason), the ship’s captain asked Dr. Kruse to leave. I am not going to get into all that here; I expressed my opinion on my Facebook page and you may sum up said opinion as “Dr. Kruse was set up and there are some serious assholes in the Paleo community.” Until some contingent of militant vegans steps forward and takes responsibility, that’s where I’ll stay, but I have yet to see him butt heads with militant vegans so I rather doubt that’s the case.

It’s a shame, too, because some people will look at how some unknown person or persons in the Paleo community have behaved and will decide to distance themselves from Paleo as a result. I at least can say I am not that petty or easily misled; there have only been a couple times in my life that I have allowed individuals to scare me away from an institution. Now you know why I am neither Catholic nor Republican–and yes, there are decent people in both demographics, but they don’t balance out the scary in my book. Nor, in my opinion, are they fighting the scary hard enough. I don’t think the Paleo community has gotten to that level of scary. Even if they did, I don’t have to be in their fucking community to follow some version of their diet. So that’s why I’m close to Paleo now even if I will never be Catholic or Republican. Between the lack of rice, the weird non-religion (I’m agnostic, if you’re curious) and the wrong politics, I figure I will never be welcome Back Home again.

OK, I’m babbling about all that a bit more than I’d intended. Sorry.

In any case, Dr. Kruse has had class enough to not make a huge deal out of the situation on his blog. He mentioned bits about it here and here. Brief, to the point, likely been out-drama-queened by whoever did this if they didn’t have to worry about hard time for the next two decades and probably about being laughed at rudely and then ignored if they asked for a Paleo prison menu. Bless.

More interesting to me was the rest of the latter post and how Dr. Kruse has stated his opinion on what actually makes people fat. I have a lot of respect for Dr. Kruse, admire his maverick self-experimenting tendencies all to hell (same for Tim Ferriss actually), and I’m not interested in getting into an argument but you know I wouldn’t refrain from disputing with a mainstream MD about calorie theory. So I thought I’d bat this around a bit and tell you what I think so far. Don’t take this as my last word or anything. There probably isn’t too much that passes for “last word” in science, and I’m not really being scientific, I’m just guessing.

Actually I have a similar issue with Dr. Kruse’s statement here to the issue I have about Dr. Stephanie Seneff’s beliefs concerning vitamin D. Both of them are apparently ignoring a tremendous loophole. I’ll digress a little bit so as to demonstrate what I mean.

This article refers to Dr. Seneff’s statement that the best form of vitamin D for your body is vitamin D sulfate, and that for that reason vitamin D3 supplements don’t do us any good because they can’t be converted to the sulfate form.

That’s all well and good except she missed a major loophole. (Or, if she mentioned it anywhere, I haven’t seen that yet–if you should happen to trip across it, please send me the link.) That loophole would be all the human beings who spread out into latitudes well beyond the equatorial region. Those in the know about vitamin D already know that people in the United States who live north of South Carolina can expect to make nearly no vitamin D outdoors between, say, October and March. Imagine how much worse it is when you live in, say, the Arctic.

This would be why people living in far northern cultures traditionally revered the salmon as a sacred food. Sometime when you’re bored, go look up the vitamin D content of sockeye salmon. If I’m not mistaken, seal is another excellent source, and that’s a sacred food in the Great White North as well. Doesn’t matter if you’re Inuit, Irish Gaelic or Siberian indigenous, that’s true for all of ‘em.

It’s clear that dietary vitamin D keeps people alive and healthy. The Arctic and subarctic regions are harsh and if you’re weak, you die fast. All these ethnic groups have elders and no, we’re not talking prematurely aged people in their thirties. What does that tell you?

So. Huge loophole there. And I’m seeing the same problem in Dr. Kruse’s claims. Dr. Kruse, to sum up his blog post, is saying that people get fat because they don’t properly experience winter anymore.

There’s just one problem with that: There are lots of slender people living round the equator. They don’t properly experience winter either. And no, they aren’t all starving.

So before you go beating yourself up because you have used central heating all your life? Don’t. And don’t feel bad if you don’t want to do that cold treatment he’s got everybody doing. Not everyone wants to do it. But before you make a decision one way or the other, I have a few other ideas about what Dr. Kruse has said here.

Equatorial peoples don’t have much in the way of seasons.

It may come out that people who do not live near the equator, and who therefore experience seasons, need the cold for a few months a year because of various neurotransmitter signals and hormone signals caused by the differing daylight durations year-round.

In this case, cold treatment would be appropriate for fat people living in temperate or arctic regions but would not be appropriate for fat people at the equator, assuming those have lived near the equator their entire lives.

For more on why the differing daylight durations year-round might matter, read this. Not an affiliate link, because I want you to go get it out of the library if you have to, just so you can examine these ideas. Assuming, of course, that you want to.

Just about no one treating the obese bothers checking them for nutritional deficiencies.

Vitamin K and fat metabolism

The ugliest word I think I have ever heard from the field of bariatric medicine, because gastric lap band and biliopancreatic diversion with duodenal switch are phrases, is “overnourished.” That is a hypnotic word, and it brainwashes doctors into honestly believing that fat people have more than enough vitamins and minerals. So no one really checks. And yet Dr. Kruse mentions something in passing that I think could also be addressed with nutrition. It’s near the beginning of the post.

Because “evolution” uses its own version of plastic surgery to remove the adipocyte [fat cell], reduce leptin, raise adiponectin and change the balance of resistin in our fat mass. What is Mother Nature’s scalpel? Cold Thermogenesis is the short answer.

So what we are after here is (along with removing fat cells entirely):

Reducing leptin
Raising adiponectin
Changing the balance of resistin in our fat mass

There are certain dietary tactics you can undergo to affect how much leptin you secrete, and Dr. Kruse goes into those elsewhere in his blog; protein is involved and a reduction in carb intake is involved. So we won’t get that far into that right now. But it’s funny he should mention adiponectin. I have mentioned adiponectin before, though I don’t know if it survived my last blog reset and I’m not looking just now.

It turns out there’s a nutrient that encourages the production of adiponectin. That nutrient is menatetrenone, also known as menaquinone-4 or vitamin K2, analog mk-4. Here is an article about menatetrenone increasing insulin sensitivity through its effects on osteocalcin production which in turn leads to an increase in adiponectin–exactly what Dr. Kruse is looking for.

Dr. Kruse has also discussed, elsewhere on his blog, the fact that a lot of people are short on menatetrenone now. Given that the vitamin is important in so many other matters besides fat loss, it’d be a hell of an oversight if he focused hardcore on his “cold thermogenesis” now to the exclusion of everything else. Save your insulin sensitivity, save your bones, and save your teeth (now you know why diabetes and tooth decay are so closely linked!) along with your figure.

Now what in the world is causing people to be short of menatetrenone? Low-fat diets of course, and specifically diets low in animal fat, K2′s best dietary source. It’s telling that cheese, a major source of K2 especially if from grass-fed cows, is a favorite cheat food of vegans. (It also tends to contain B12.) A low-fat diet necessarily being high-carb if you want any energy left at the end of the day, this is at least an indirect way that carbs cause obesity. I suspect it will come out eventually that carbs also contribute to decreased levels of K2 in the body, similarly to how they clash with B vitamins. (Not sure whether carbs deplete B vitamin stores, block absorption, or some other thing. But the inverse relationship between carb intake and B vitamin levels is known science by now.)

Fiber intake versus fat intake

You gotta have the calcium intake to make osteocalcin. Goes without saying. If you eat a diet too high in fiber relative to your fat intake then you will not absorb enough calcium. There’s another way carbs make you fat. It’s all well and good to say that a person eating Paleo doesn’t need a lot of calcium, but it turns out there’s a point to all the calcium supplementation if someone’s going to eat the way the government tells them to eat. I think it’s only delaying the inevitable, myself, but you can’t save everybody.

By the way, all you faileos out there who keep preaching at people to eat ten pounds of veggies a day (yes, I’m exaggerating–or I’d better be) are just as much a part of this problem as anybody. You should be telling people to eat more animal, and you’re falling down on the job. Bone broth plus tallow and lard plus salmon or sunshine for the D (oh, lard also contains D!) equals happy bones. Put down the fucking kale and grow a spine. If you have to lie to people about their dietary requirements to get them to eat like you, they’re a lost cause. Drop it and move on.

There are other nutritional issues in play here but it’s getting late, I’m losing brain cells (yes, Dr. Kruse, I’m naughty and stay up late–you’re right, I need to quit that shit), and this post is too long already. Basically, deal with the deficiencies before going in for the heroics or your body will not work right when you start the heroics.

And finally, because seriously I’m getting tired…

Cure does not equal cause.

It is not a deficiency in open-heart surgery that causes heart attacks. If it turns out I’m right about the seasonal light differences having a strong influence on fat accumulation (and if I am right it’s not my original idea but rather I am standing on the shoulders of giants, and I don’t mean T. S. Wiley), then it’s not the lack of cold causing the fat accumulation, but rather the seasonal light differences. The cold is the CORRECTIVE that does away with the fat accumulation caused by neurotransmitter and hormonal changes in late summer.

Given that a high-carb diet causes so much damage all by itself what with the way it strips nutrients and sends hormones all wonky I would never tell someone they are off the hook to eat carbs as long as they take a lot of cold baths. Dr. Kruse is not saying that either, but he seems to imply it by saying carbs don’t cause obesity.

I think the very, very best dietary approach to take for someone living where there are seasons is to eat as if carbs are not available all year round. That is how every traditional culture in temperate, subarctic, and arctic regions has eaten prior to developing (or learning) agriculture. Yes, that’s going to mean low-carb for at least part of the year–it so happens, during the same time of year that we don’t get much light. One is protective against the other.

Get all that squared away, then think about the cold thermogenesis again. Please do not think you’re off the hook and can gorge on “safe starches” and then be surprised when the problems don’t go away.

And that’s it for now before I become incoherent. This really should have been a series of posts but I didn’t trust myself to maintain a train of thought over three or four days. Anyway, I more hope this is a springboard for some real discussion and not the ego-tripping that I’m afraid is about to happen on all sides.

We’re here to solve the fucking problem. I know you need to pay bills, but there’s nothing wrong with being a janitor, either. If figuring this out means you have to be a janitor from then on, you oughta be the kind of person to accept that with grace. I like to think I would.

Need more protein!

Dana Seilhan — Fri, 11 May 2012 18:02:56 +0000

For those who haven’t heard this already, which hopefully is at least one of you reading this, my highest known weight (since I’ve had a scale) was around 249.5. I say “around” not because I can’t remember but because at that time I wasn’t following the weigh-in protocol I’m following now: first thing in the morning, take a pee, strip down to undies and bra and socks and then weigh in. So I don’t actually know for sure that I was 249 and a half. But I was definitely close to it; no one at my height (5’6″ or 5’7″) and gender should weigh that much in clothes unless the clothes are a medieval European suit of armor. If you do, something ain’t kosher in the land of Denmark.

Accordingly, the effort to lose. The one I keep starting and stopping. I believe, though I’m still in the process of digging up all my old weigh-in photos, that I hit that high point (and low point) in 2009.

But that wasn’t when I began my journey. The first time I ever tried Atkins was in 2003. I did not have regular access to a scale to tell me what my starting weight was, nor how much progress I made, but I can say I got into ketosis and wound up saner than I’d been in a couple years by that point. (I lost my marriage and my son in 1999, to give you a benchmark.)

Then my ex-mother-in-law got it into her head to really fuck with me in early 2004, at which point I gave up on everything for a while–Atkins, school, and so on. Other than a brief flirtation with Slim-Fast during my marriage which had ended when my ex remarked upon how much sugar was in the shakes, this was my first real effort at a diet of any type. And I would revisit it many times over the intervening nine years, jumping on and off the wagon over and over as my life went through its inevitable ups and downs.

So that fifty-pound loss has taken the better part of ten years. ‘Scuse me if I would like the next sixty to take a considerably shorter amount of time. Know-whut-I’m-sayin’?

But… I’m still having trouble eating enough!

Ketosis is awesome, and I hate the way experts get hysterical about it and try to scare people away from trying it–and never mind that it’s used to treat epilepsy in children, dear God, it’s good enough for the kids but not teh fattiez? But it has a drawback, and not the one you might be thinking. It’s an appetite-killer!

That’s great for avoiding carb junk like chips and crackers and soda. It SUCKS when you are also skipping out on stuff you NEED.

Or when I am, anyway.

It is apparent I will need to schedule myself three meals a day, at least for right now, and plan and prepare ahead if I want to spend more time eating and less time making excuses.

So I’m taking a cue from the Body For Life people and I have purchased some boneless pork loin chops, some boneless/skinless chicken breasts, and about ten pounds of ground chuck that I’ll be divvying up into half-pound servings, as ground beef seems to go very well with scrambled eggs.

And I’ll probably take another cue from Tim Ferriss and eat pretty much the same meals daily, perhaps with some variation in veggie intake. Because I notice one of my obstacles is meal-planning, so if I don’t have to do that very much, that’ll be a huge help.

I already investigated nutritional content on the above servings of meat and it looks like one of each daily, plus two eggs, will just about cover my protein needs for the day. So hopefully if I do this for long enough we’ll start seeing some real progress. Not only is this getting in the way of weight loss but it seems to also be getting in the way of my energy level, and that just won’t work–I have too much to do, and I’d like to take up exercise at some point as well.

Now that I’ve bored you completely to death, let me share what I found when I was looking for the above egg photo.

Ain’t that pretty? I have NO idea what the stuff is in between the yolks and the fish eggs, but you could do this with regular deviled eggs and I bet it’s awesome.

P.S. Speaking of Body For Life, I do not approve of their dietary teachings, but I do like the whole transformation meme. I’m toying with the idea of doing something like that to spice up this blog, but NO PROMISES. I was thinking a more Paleo-ish diet coupled with maybe the PACE exercise program. We’ll see.

I caught you, you little bastard.

Dana Seilhan — Tue, 08 May 2012 16:48:08 +0000

LOOK!

8 May 2012 at 199 pounds

I don’t know that this is permanent. I imagine I’ll go back and forth for a little while. I’ll be real happy when I get down far enough that I don’t go up over 200 anymore, but I’m pretty sure I’m not there yet.

I’m just happy I finally caught it on camera. Was starting to wonder if I’d imagined it all.

Saturday stats, 5 May 2012

Dana Seilhan — Sun, 06 May 2012 13:22:25 +0000

I’m posting this a day late (though I took it yesterday) and will explain why in a minute.

5 May 2012 at 200.5 pounds

OMG FRUSTRATED. This past week I stepped on the scale on a whim (I think that was Thursday?) and discovered, to my delight, a weight number beginning with 1 for the first time since my daughter was a newborn. I had been at around 180 when I got pregnant with her (or so I’m guessing since that was the weight I settled in at after I had had my son, though I’d gotten down to 160ish in the six months after losing him–amazing what stress plus poverty will do to you), and had gotten back to 180 in the few days immediately after her birth (so said the hospital scale), but by the time I’d gone in for my six-week postpartum I was up to 210. WTF? I said. Is it my thyroid? My Medicaid-paid doctor ran a TSH, it came back in normal range, and no one cared to inquire further.

So seeing that on the scale was fun. Yet when I let the scale rest for several minutes and came back with my camera, the scale decided I was half a pound heavier. Back into 200s. ACK.

It’s been like that for the rest of the week. I are sad. I know I will get back to Onederland but it’s still hard.

OK. Now for the reason I didn’t post. I was tired after a long day that started with this:

President Obama at opening rally for re-election campaign, Columbus, Ohio, 5 May 2012

I’ve been lukewarm about that whole thing and I still don’t see him as the nation’s savior–that happy task falls to you and me, as American citizens in a supposed democracy–but hearing people boo the assholes who want to loot and gut this country even further than they already have, did my heart a world of good. What would do me even more good is if all the people bitching about taxes in this country which has an amazingly low effective income-tax rate compared to other developed Western countries would wake the fuck up and ask why it’s not OK to tax us, but it’s perfectly OK to kill our jobs and cut our wages and destroy our infrastructure. You want theft of income? Try not having a fucking job because Romney bought your employer and tore it apart for his own personal profit. You want that running the entire country? I wish you the best of luck. If the GOP really wanted Obama gone they should have nominated someone who wasn’t a crazy thieving asshole. Or just crazy. (I don’t like Ron Paul either. He doesn’t see women as human beings who deserve liberty.)

So there you go. My little bit of stumping for the campaign. You’re welcome, Mister President.

If I had a Dumbass Award, I’d be handing it out. And keeping a copy.

Dana Seilhan — Wed, 02 May 2012 00:58:35 +0000

I’ve been going through a bit of a thing lately. I know the mental and emotional reasons for it and I think I also know the physical reasons, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But it’s a thing. And I’ve been going through it. It’s not as bad as the various times where my ex-in-laws were fucking with me or I thought they were fucking with me, but it still dredges up all sorts of unpleasant thoughts I think about my life situation which simmer beneath the surface and bubble up to haunt me every now and again.

The good news is, I know now that at least one guy out there in the world, who isn’t the other adult living in my house, has been interested enough to contact me and want to meet with me for a friendly cup of coffee. After a multiple-year dry spell, this is tremendous in a way that most of you probably don’t understand. But there’s still the bad news that I go round with a chip on my shoulder because it took me fifteen years to thoroughly fuck up my life (I had help, mind you) and I guess on some level I am expecting to fix it all up overnight.

By the way, if you’re in my adopted hometown of Columbus, Ohio and a bald guy named John H. who’s into running happens to contact you on Facebook and chat you up, go for it. He sounds pretty interesting. (He’s even liberal.) I am just not ready for that kind of thing in my life right now even if I kept it friendly.

Okay, so, on the heels of that, I was WILFing* around and happened across a website offering an ebook about diet and healthy lifestyle. This one. The title alone was enough to pique my interest; I have a few quibbles about the text, but I would still recommend it to people who aren’t ready for the quibbling and just want something simple. This book is going to get you probably 90 percent of the way there, if you don’t come up with some creative way to follow it in letter but not in spirit. Just the same, the language was my favorite part of it. As I said to someone on my page, I thought I was the only diet** blogger out there with a pottymouth. Well, unless you count this guy. I guess I sort of do, when he’s not calling women the c-bomb, or worse. (Dumbass. At least a third of your readers are female.)

So I was all giggly and shit about the ebook title, and decided to share it on my Facebook page. That’s when the festivities started. About eight lost followers later, I wasn’t quite sure what had hit me.

This is as good a time as any to repeat the general sentiment I shared there (well, after the defiant neener neener FUCKING neener I posted up when the exodus began), to wit: You know full fucking well, if you read the “about” page on this blog or the “about” section on my Facebook page, that I fucking swear. I’d rather you leave than stay if you really can’t stand it, but I’d prefer even more if you never followed or Liked me at all, if I’m that offensive. This is as much a personal blog as it is a diet blog. I’m not casting my pearls before fucking swine. I’ve had to go through too much of that shit in the past fifteen years already. No more.

Now, I’m not like that little chicken dude on Tiny Toon Adventures who swears so much you can’t understand what he’s saying because it’s a kids’ show and there’s nothing but bleeps and articles coming out of his mouth (beak?). Sometimes, in fact, I hardly cuss at all. But if you’re going to “like” or follow me, be aware that the potential exists. It seems weird, I know, that I would harp on this. But after a divorce, the loss of a child, my credit being shot to hell, my marital home being foreclosed, most of my (former) friends turning out to be flaky or psycho or both, and my family… well, I don’t know what’s going on there but it’s been a problem since my childhood and I’ve pretty much given up on them… I don’t have much else to lose but control over my own speech. Go take that censorship shit somewhere else. I’m paying for this blog and you’re not.

OK. So we’ve talked about the female-slandering dumbass, though he wasn’t really the point of this post; we’ve talked about the prudish dumbasses getting the vapors.

Now let’s talk about me.

I guess we need to revisit what I said last week about being all pious about the dairy. I really have the best of intentions about this, but sometimes Inner Brat gets in the way. And I’m not letting her get her way through the usual channels–no wheat since early March***, whuuut?–so I guess she’s out to be sneaky.

My weight’s going nowhere. I went all-meat to break that stall of around 210 (209, 211, etc.), and that worked spectacularly. Now I’m hovering around 200 (201, 202, etc.), and on top of that I feel kind of crappy. Literally so, sometimes. Also weird headachy episodes and over-sensitivity to weather fronts and that sort of thing, after weeks with pretty much no headaches at all. This with having added vegetables back in. Kind of gobsmacked.

Tonight, after the other adult in the house came home with stuff from Buffalo Wild Wings, it hit me. I’ve had BW3 wings (just the wings, we’ve got veggies here and I don’t want their starchy crap) at least three or four times in the past month or so. And I only get one flavor, ever, from BW3. And that flavor is…

…*drumroll*…

…Parmesan Garlic.

Right.

No, I have no fucking idea what I did there. It’s like there was this brick wall between Responsible Self and the full knowledge and import of what I was eating. It was easy meat and very tasty and I didn’t have to deal with the kitchen. I was a bit worried that the coating had canola oil in it but that was about all.

Well, now it’s hit me. Now I know. I’m debating whether to bother finishing the other half of the tub tomorrow. It could go either way at this point. But from here on out I am cleaning the fuck up. I cannot know with certainty how dairy affects me if I don’t completely cut it out for a while. And so far the data haven’t been encouraging… so.

The irony is that I got maybe four hours’ sleep last night because my little girl’s sick (nothing major, just a random virus that’s going around). I think better on that little sleep? Really?

Whatever it is, I’m saving a copy of my hypothetical Dumbass Award for myself. I figure I’ve earned it.

—–
*WILFing = What was I Looking For? My usual method of web-surfing. I was a terror in K-12 English class when we had to do a research paper, let’s put it that way. I get lost in dictionaries and encyclopedias; when the World Wide Web came along, I didn’t stand a chance. Nerd cred FTW.

**Meant to convey “dietary pattern” or “nutritional health,” not “Kimkins diet.” *shudder*

***Except for traces in the soy sauce and a couple other things at bd’s Mongolian Grill. But I haven’t sought out a plate of noodles at Noodles & Co. again.

Saturday stats, 28 April 2012

Dana Seilhan — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 02:47:01 +0000

Let me tell you about the week I’ve had…

28 April 2012 at 202.5 pounds

You know how I got all fucking pious last weekend about possibly dumping dairy?

Okay.

Monday night, I think it was, I decided to make shirataki spaghetti because the ingredients were there and I couldn’t think of anything better to do that both my kid and I would eat. This is no small consideration. We live in an area of town with a high vegetarian population and that’s what she hears all the time. Kids are little sponges and she might have soaked this up from the media anyway even if we weren’t constantly running into self-righteous hippies with kale stuck between their teeth. Be that as it may. So it takes some effort to get her to eat meat, and some more effort still to get her to eat meat that she believes to contain fat. We have explained to her about how there is fat in butter and cream, which she will consume with little to no hesitation, and it doesn’t matter. But include fat with her meat and it’s World War Three at the dinner table. So you can imagine my delight when she ate her dinner on Monday night. And it’d been so long since I’d had cheese that I helped myself to some from the shaky can.

This was the first I’d had nightshades since I started this whole crazy experiment. Between the cheese and the tomato sauce, I’m not sure which hit me.

The next day I woke with a headache that did not get better with lounging around moaning and hiding my eyes from the light. Sleeping it off was out of the question even if I hadn’t been home alone with my daughter. I had to get up and pace the floor before the pain let up at all. (WTF?) And then my stomach got upset. Really upset. Throwing a little snit and flailing its nonexistent arms and drumming its imaginary feet someplace unpleasant because there were still about two and a half feet or so between it and the floor, ow. I spent some time in the bathroom bent over the trash can because I was worried about my other end.

I haven’t done that since I was married. Which should say something about the state of my marriage, and further elucidate why it no longer exists.

For all I know, it was neither food. We’ve had some yucky weather and fronts this week. I haven’t felt right since Tuesday morning, though I haven’t had a headache again. I get to feeling physically not-right when we get a lot of bad weather–though, honestly, this could be a lot worse. I mean, it’s spring. We’ve had it pretty mild even with the rain. One big loud crashy-bangy thing Tuesday night or so that woke both me and Thea, and just rain otherwise.

So, jury’s still way the hell out, and did I mention I’m fed up with being a walking chemistry experiment? People have been watching me go through this for years. It’s less un-fun now than it was eight years ago, but it’s still no picnic.

I want to get some butterbur this pay period, and possibly also that chelated multi-mineral I’ve had my eyes on for a while, just to see what happens. Worst-case scenario, nothing does.

Saturday stats, 21 April 2012

Dana Seilhan — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 19:53:55 +0000

Hmmm.

21 April 2012 at 201 pounds

I had mentioned that reintroducing heavy cream might be a problem. I’ve gone back and forth with it this week because I wasn’t quite ready to let go of it yet. But now I think I need to give it a week cream-free just to see how things will turn out next Saturday. I ought to be dropping 1-2 pounds a week right now–my carb intake isn’t that high.

I think I’ll give it that week, and if I start losing again I’ll introduce ghee and try that the following week. If the ghee’s OK, then great, at least I’ll know I can handle dairyfat. If it’s not, then I’ll scream and whine and cry a lot and then declare dairy verboten, probably for good, or at least til I get down to something like a reasonable weight. And then only for planned cheats.

Now don’t take this to mean I’m going to tell everyone to shitcan dairy, because I won’t. I already have found evidence that I don’t respond to gluten well, and it’s not uncommon for someone with gluten sensitivity to respond badly to casein (a dairy protein) also. It’s sounding like the gluten sensitivity paves the way for the casein sensitivity, though I doubt anyone knows for sure. Be that as it may, it’s an issue for some people. Doesn’t mean everyone fares badly. Your mileage may vary.

I still think dairy’s a useful source of ruminant fat in an age in which “low in saturated fat” is considered a selling point for sustainable beef, and cattle are slaughtered younger than they’d have been hunted back in the Paleolithic. So if you can, go for it. If not, though, you gotta ask yourself which is more important: keeping this one food category in your diet, or improving your health?

That’s the question I’m facing, and I know how I’m answering it.

Body shape changes, and other observations

Dana Seilhan — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:04:14 +0000

This gets a bit personal so if talking about body parts bothers you, you might want to skip this post. I don’t just talk about body parts, though, so tough it out if you want. The other stuff is further down the page.

Anyway…

I’m happy that the weight loss has got something to show for it, but I’m a bit bummed at the same time.

I think my boobs are going to disappear.

One fun thing about being overweight has been the ownership of a rack. It hasn’t been the world’s nicest rack or anything, but at least it looked OK in clothes.

I didn’t have boobs worth speaking of back when I was slender–the shape was OK, I guess, but they were hardly there. (Weirdly, I was sized at a 32C. Where was the C part, under my armpits???) Rumor had it that at least one ex referred to me as a “boobless wonder.” I couldn’t buy matched outfit sets because either the bottoms were too small or the tops were too large. That kind of fun.

Now it looks like I’m going back to that again. And of course this time around, after two kids and a weight gain of over a hundred pounds, they’ll be all deflated and saggy and pointing at the floor, too.

Anyway, so, the situation with bras. I had gone without them for a long time because I didn’t see the point–it wasn’t like anybody was looking at me anyway. Back in ’10 when Asshole Ex got in touch with me and I suddenly started caring about my appearance, I finally bought some bras, about a size 44. Early this year it was becoming obvious that those bras weren’t cutting it–I was falling out of them. Some of that was their age, but some of it was that my band size had just shrunk. So, 42s. And now, not six months later, it looks like I’ve graduated down to at least a 40.

I have to stick with sports bras because the ones with cups are weird. My left boob is bigger than my right, so the right one kind of gets lost in a cup size that would fit the left. MAN I hate that. But I’m holding out against getting real bras til I get down to a real size. I don’t know where I will end up, so I get bras that don’t have a cup size, so that everything averages out. Plus, they are more comfy. I hate underwires and I don’t know that I would ever buy one again.

(In fact, one of my planned end-of-weight-loss rewards is a bit of a shopping spree here. They will even adjust my cup sizes!)

It’s also looking like this will be the second time in twelve months that I’ve had to size down on underwear. I think I mentioned on the latest photo progress post that mine sticks out too much in the back. That’s generally a good sign they’re getting too big. Man, I hate all the wardrobe changes. If I don’t watch it, they will get expensive.

Right now I seem to overall be a size 18, more or less. Except I have one pair of size 16 (W) jeans in the closet because I can get them on, button them, and zip them. Or I could before I washed them. Point is, they’ll fit soon. Yes, boys and girls: I own a pair of skinny(er) jeans!

I’m not keeping fat pants around though. I want getting fatter to hurt, not be easy. Just my thing, nobody else has to agree with it, and I won’t judge you either way.

OK, now for the non-body-parts-related stuff.

So I’ve reintroduced the heavy cream, and I’m not sure about it yet. It’s very subtle, but I seem to have taken on a little bit of water retention. And I have a tendency to this anyway. But my fingers have filled out a little bit and my right foot has swollen a little. And they weren’t doing that before I reintro’d the cream.

I could dismiss it as a weather front kind of thing–I get headaches sometimes when those come through, and sometimes I get joint pain, and I think sometimes I get edema. And that could still be the problem, I don’t know.

I could also blame hormones, except Aunt Flo has just visited (sorry, there go the body bits again), and this is the point in my cycle where I should have LESS retention, not more.

So I thought I’d give it a couple days on the coconut milk again and see if there is any difference. Edema has been the bane of my existence off and on since my left foot swelled mysteriously at age eighteen. If I find there are foods that trigger it, it’s time to shitcan them, much as I hate to say so.

But if it turns out cream does do this to me, I will try ghee before I give up. I at least want to keep butter in my diet, even if it has to be clarified.

So there you go. Life in my world right now…

[edit] Oh, one other thing I’m noticing this week. Back to body parts again for a bit. I don’t know why, but occasionally I get this red angry spot in my left armpit. It looks for all the world like a yeast infection. But I only get it on the left side.

Well, I hadn’t had it in a while, and had pretty much forgotten about them. But this week it’s turning up again.

So I’m suspicious it could be a dairy reaction. The usual reasons I’d assumed that it was showing up have not been in play this time around. So what I will probably do is go without cream the rest of the week, then try to start it again this Sunday and see what happens. If the rash comes back, I’ll know.

Yeah, my body, being weird. Completely unusual.

Photo progress, 14 April 2012

Dana Seilhan — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 19:33:13 +0000

I haven’t done a set like this since the New Year, and didn’t really see the point because five pounds won’t look like a lot.

Well, at my weight, fifteen pounds doesn’t look like a lot either, but 200 is a milestone, so what the hell.

By the way, I think I’m shrinking out of my underwear. It was sticking up out the back of my shorts and I had to reshoot the side-view photos. D’oh! And they’re bright red today. There is NO missing them.

14 April 2012, frontal view, abs relaxed	14 April 2012, frontal view, gut sucked in	14 April 2012, profile view, abs relaxed
14 April 2012, profile view, gut sucked in	14 April 2012, upper arm and shoulder	14 April 2012, face, frontal view
14 April 2012, face, profile view	14 April 2012, legs, frontal view	14 April 2012, back view

For comparison’s sake, here’s the first set of pictures. (Scroll down.)

I apologize that everything’s not at the exact same angle as it was last time. I’m doing this all by myself, and I’d have to mark things with tape and then leave them up half the year before I could aim and pose properly. Also, I had a real tripod this time. Also, my Samsung is a bitch and didn’t want to focus properly on some of the shots, but I kept them anyway because (1) I already had to do some shots twice thanks to the Red Flag Undies Incident; and (2) they don’t need to be razor-sharp for you to tell what they’re portraying.

I’m seeing some smoothing out on my legs though. They were a lot more cottage-cheese-like the last time around, and this time the line is much more graceful–if you could ever use the word “graceful” to describe my derpy-assed, knock-kneed so-called legs. I didn’t like them when I was slender, either. They have not improved at all.

I see bat-wing surgery in my future for the upper arms, though. And no matter how brave you might think I am for doing this photo series, I am not pulling down my shorts in front to show you how bad the gut is. I’m pretty sure you figured that out from the contours, anyway. Ew. That’s another one that’d go under the knife if I really wanted to be vain enough. Not now, of course. Later, when I’m at a reasonable weight for it and maintain that weight for long enough. If it doesn’t go away on its own. I’ve seen some encouraging signs so far, but I also have about a million stretch marks in that area. You should have seen me in my first pregnancy: I had tiger stripes on my belly! So… yeah. That’s probably never going to be pretty. Sorry to say.

And those shorts are getting fucking baggy. It’ll be fun trying to do another set 20 pounds from now. I suppose I could try lycra bicycle shorts next…