Monday April 27, 2015
Dietbet Starting weight: 151.4
Weight: 146.5
Okay. I can’t get too excited about ridiculous weight loss in only one week. Okay, just a little:
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!! Ahem.
But seriously, a 1lb drop over night is not permanent weight loss, and my weight goes up and down almost every day, so I’d just be happy with being in the 146’s at all by the end of the week. Even 147 is ok…I’d still have two weeks to get down to 145.3 and win my diet bet, but, no doubt, if I can just maintain this loss, I’d be ecstatic. That would mean I would only have 1.2 lbs to lose (and maintain) to win the diet bet ending in 22 days. So I’d only have to lose .6lbs every 11 days.
But again, my body doesn’t really work like this. I wish it did, but it just doesn’t. My weight on a daily basis goes up and down. One day I’m 144… the next I’m 146? The next I’m back down to 145 and so on --- This is just how it goes with my body. Thanks to Withings, I have proof of this – as the app produces a graph that shows my weight over time.

Anyway, I know why I had such a dramatic weight loss from yesterday to today. When I woke up yesterday, I did the same thing I’ve been doing every day for the past two weeks. 3 minute abs slide (I alternate between abs slide and the 7 minute workout) followed by cardio (it was a weekend, so I did 45 minutes instead of my usual 30). After that, my husband and I had breakfast together: 3 slices bacon, ½ avocado, scrambled eggs with gruyere cheese, and 1/3 cup blueberries topped with whipped heavy cream.
Then, we went to the Princeton Communiversity (we took our dog with us). I am not exactly sure why my husband likes street fairs so much. He never buys anything and almost never stops at any of the stalls. I stopped at some of the jewelry stallsà but Princeton is so expensive, even their street fairs. The one necklace I liked was listed at $115, which is insane for street fair jewelry. We walked all over Princeton and then we stopped at two food trucks. CK got paella – though it was more like Latin seafood risotto, as it didn’t have the crunch to it. He fed me pieces of his seafood without the rice—shrimp, muscles, etc.
Then we walked over to the food truck that advertised “breakfast all day”, which is always a safe bet for me. They mostly had sandwiches, but for a dollar extra, you could get your sandwich “bread-free” on top of home fries. I’m sure they would have left the home fries off if I had asked, but my husband insisted that he wanted them. I ordered a “sandwich” (bread free) called the Urban cowboy, which had a fried egg, pulled pork, sautéed onion, herdsman cheese and siracha mayo. It was delicious. I’m not sure if the pulled pork was braised in sugar (pulled pork is often braised in regular coke or dr. pepper), but the weight loss of 1lb over night, says “look at me, really not caring.”
By the time CK and I got home, we were exhausted. I still had some energy and I used that to cross stitch. We skipped dinner because we were both too tired to make an effort cooking and it was so late by the time we even thought of it that we didn’t think it would be worth it, since we’d just want to go to bed right after, anyway. I made him scrambled eggs with some left over popcorn broccoli. I made myself a little snack of whole milk ricotta cheese with cinnamon and heavy whipped cream. The whole day came out to be a little over 1300 calories. And I walked 12,472 steps.
Now, you could be reading this and say – why don’t you just limit your calories to that little all the time (which a lot of dieters do) and try to get in that much activity every day?
Well, there are a few reasons. For one: I’ve tried it. It never really works as well as one would expect. I have started a process of building up a little muscle, burning fat through some moderate exercise and eating until I am satisfied, which usually falls in the range of 1800 to 2400 calories. In other words, right now, my little mitochondria are used to eating high calorie, delicious, fat laden (low carbohydrate) meals, and they’ve responded well. They’re all revved up and primed to burn what energy comes their way. One day on 1300 calories won’t make them slow down, thus the ridiculous weight loss overnight.
However, if I kept it up, two things would happen. The first thing that would happen is that my body would notice that I was starving it. 1200 calories is the minimum number of calories your body needs to perform basic functions – heart pumping, organ’s function, etc. Yes, my body would turn to my fat for the energy I would need to do the other things I perform on a daily basis (IE, walk, run, move), but soon (in a week or so), noticing that it’s not getting enough calories for all of that, my body would lower its temperature and burn calories more slowly to conserve as much of that precious fat as possible. And, to make sure that it would take as little fat as possible, it would start eating my muscles, which is the last thing you want your body to do when you’re trying to lose weight. Yes. I would lose weight – but it would be slow, and not necessarily what I would want it to lose.
That’s why a lot of people on restricted calorie diets have the following symptoms: Irritability, brain fog, constant hunger (your body begging you for food), sugar and fat cravings (JUNK FOOD), headaches, fatigue, poor sleep, brittle hair and nails, dull or sagging skin and worst of all: slowed weight loss.
The best way I have found the best way to lose weight for me has been to not restrict natural fats (saturated and mono-unsaturated), eat 3 square meals until satisfied, eat a snack or two if I’m hungry, build a little muscle, and burn some excess calories doing a little cardio. That way, my body knows it’s getting plenty of what it needs and keeps the metabolic fire burning.
Now, if I upped my exercise in an attempt to compensate for this down regulation – say to 90 minutes per day or several hours (like they work out on the biggest loser), my body would completely stress out and produce hormones to again preserve as much fat as possible. In other words, 45 minutes of cardio good: 90 minutes or greater of cardio bad.
My 4% dietbet is one of probably two more sprints in a yearlong marathon to lose 35 or so lbs. I probably would have lost it all by now, except after my wedding – I sort of took a little time off, started eating a little junk food (mostly sugar free candy) and stopped all exercise…for 4 months. Not surprisingly, I gained 5lbs during that time. Considering how much I was eating and how little I was moving, 5 lbs over 4 months really isn’t all that bad.
So my goal with joining this first diet bet was to lose that 5lbs I gained when I was eating too much and not exercising at all. For now, I am going to keep my eye on that prize, which I should just about hit when this diet bet is over.
I’ll tackle the last 10lbs soon after. It may be a marathon, but the technique is the same as a sprint: One food in front of the other.
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Posted on 4/27/2015 by scintillaa
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